Energy Modeling is becoming inevitable in large scale developments. There are numerous interfaces and softwares available in the market both open source and commercial still there is clear gap in energy plus user community for efficient handling/editing of IDF file for typical repetitive tasks encountered during large modeling jobs. This initiative is taken to address this issue in its entirety. Therefore we are pleased to announce that we will be contributing with our existing scripts bank, useful in automating Energyplus energy modeling tasks. This initiative will be known as Energyplus Open Scripting Initiative. This is intended for advance Energyplus users who have already spend much of their time in handling text, idf files and are proficient with input data structure and idd files. This initiative will not replace the use of IDF editor or any third party GUI, individual may be using but yes it can enhance various features for efficient editing idf files. The repository of resulting Energyplus scripts will be made available to the community under GPL(the issue is still under debate)

This effort is supported by www.geedindia.org and www.ibpsaindia.org
To register your interest please connect with us via scripts@geedindia.org

Following are some initial perl scripts at glance for the user community.

1. IDFEditV1.0

This script is used for easy and quick editing of the idf files. Unlike other available tools there is no limit of objects that can be handled. There is a cross platform support as well. There are numerous things that can be done by the script such as logical text handling within the idf. As an example five different kind of meetering needs to be applied to "Lights" object and there are 500 such objects. The script will allow you to write a small logic in any of the spread sheet editor and update your idf file instantly by closing the workspace.

Get the Script

2. symRepV1.0

This script is used for batch replace of various specific string array with another array of same size. This is still in under development and shall be used for inheriting example file structure in your own idf file by a simple operation.

Get the Script

3. CreateAppG2007V1.0

This script is a fully functional Perl program which can convert only surface and zone information into an Appendix G baseline. This script will ask series of questions like climate zone and system type etc and automatically create appendix G baseline on a custom geometry exported by any of the energy plus GUI available in the market.

Get the Script

4. Tunnel Critical Velocity v1.0

In fire modeling and tunnel ventilation system design, tunnel critical velocity that corresponds to a velocity when no back layering is expected can be empirically estimated by Kennedy formula (ref. NFPA 130, 502). Also this constitute a critical thrust requirement that can also be estimated by the following software. This software is no replacement to Actual Tunnel Air flow network solvers.Original intent of the software is quick estimations during system commissioning. The same is available for smart phone and tablets apart from following windows version.

Download the Desktop Application           Download the Android Application

Please share your idea with us and we will try to automate that for you within energy plus environment.