WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Building Technologies Program is offering a Webinar on its EnergyPlus™ software on Tuesday, February 16, 2010, from 12:00-1:30 p.m. EST titled “Going With the Flow: Designing High-Performance Buildings with EnergyPlus.”

To facilitate energy-efficient design of high-performance buildings, DOE provides its free EnergyPlus software to predict energy flows in commercial and residential buildings. According to DOE, EnergyPlus is a fully integrated building, HVAC, and renewable energy simulation program that models building heating, cooling, ventilating, lighting, and other energy flows, as well as water. The program is said to include a number of innovative simulation capabilities, such as time steps of less than an hour, modular systems and plant integrated with heat balance-based zone simulation, multi-zone airflow, thermal comfort, water use, natural ventilation, and photovoltaic systems.

OpenStudio, DOE’s free plug-in for the Google SketchUp 3D drawing program, is designed to make it easy to create and edit the building geometry in EnergyPlus input files or launch EnergyPlus simulations and view the results in SketchUp.

This Webinar will focus on the importance of precise energy simulations in creating high-performance buildings, and will provide an overview of the features and capabilities of the EnergyPlus software and OpenStudio plug-in.

The Webinar is free of charge, but you must register in advance to obtain the URL and password for logging on and the phone number to connect to the audio. For more information and to register, visit www1.eere.energy.gov/buildings/webinars.html.

Publication date: 02/08/2010