ATLANTA — The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Energy Modeling Conference, scheduled for Oct. 1-3, 2012, in Atlanta, aims to advance attendees’ abilities to accurately model and simulate a building’s energy use through some 40 presentations, keynote speeches, networking, and a modeling tools software developer session.

ASHRAE said the conference will address a variety of programs and applications, such as variable refrigerant flow, thermal bridging, labyrinth ventilation systems, ground source heat pumps, dedicated outdoor air systems, and hybrid systems.

“The ASHRAE Energy Modeling Conference: Tools for Designing High Performance Buildings, addresses the most pressing issues facing modelers and those responsible for modeling in their companies,” said Dennis Knight, chair of the conference. “Attendees at this, the second ASHRAE Energy Modeling Conference, will benefit by networking with other modelers and software developers and by the numerous hands-on modeling presentations, including case studies, updates on ASHRAE standards and codes, and current tools available in the marketplace, their applications and workarounds.”

Conference highlights include:

• Calibrating existing building energy models — using a procedure to represent existing building energy use accurately and reliably — and a case study on retrofits.

• Lessons learned from Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) projects, featuring the top 10 mistakes that modelers make.

• A large building session that shows how an extensive model was developed and includes techniques for editing the resulting large data sets.

• A session that presents tools and techniques for contemporary systems, such as ground source heat pumps (GSHP) and variable refrigerant flow (VRF), which help to develop system components, performance curves, and operating characteristic libraries for use in the common whole building simulation tools.

• How cloud computing provides access to greater computing power, with examples of how this is improving project sustainability through more extensive modeling.

• Life cycle cost analysis of energy conservation measures and the comparison of modeled to actual performance for whole buildings, existing buildings, and hybrid HVAC systems.

• An exploration of the effective use of building information modeling (BIM).

The conference has two keynote addresses: “Energy Modeling in the Design Process: From Life Cycle Costing to the AIA Energy Modeling Guide” presented by Daniel Nall, WSP Flack + Kurtz, New York, and “Will BIM and Building Energy Modeling Evolve to Meet the Demand?” by John Kennedy, Autodesk, Santa Rosa, Calif.

Another conference feature is “Market-Reality Session — Modeling Tools: What Works, What Doesn't and Workarounds.” Modeling software developers are presented with common modeling scenarios on how their specific software can model a scenario, or in some cases, how they do not, and what workarounds are available. Participating companies to date include Carrier, IES, Sefaira, and Trane.

For more information or to register, go to www.ashrae.org/EMC2012.

Publication date: 9/17/2012