Plus:CollectingTheNecessaryData

Collecting the Necessary Data

Of course, WUFI Plus needs some data to perform the calculations. However, the equations built into WUFI Plus have been formulated in terms of quantities that are well known or readily available, or can easily be measured or estimated.

This is what WUFI Plus needs:

Building

The building to simulate needs to be defined with dimensions, components and windows.

Dimensions

To define the dimensions of the building, one has to use the building wizard. The building wizard offers two options: Automatic building generation or script generation.

In automatic mode, general measures and information about the building like:

• widths [m]
• depths [m]
• heights [m]
• roof geometry
• bottom offset
• number of stories
• story height
• orientation

and information about attached unheated zones are required.

In script mode, all edge points to define the building assemblies are needed. The orientation of the main facade, the kind of partition for every building component and the kind of attached zone for every attached zone are defined in the script.

Climate

These quantities define the boundary conditions at the surfaces of the building component:

• rain load on the surface [Ltr/m²h],
  as dependent on the inclination and orientation of the building component,
• short-wave (solar) radiation flux density [W/m²],
  as dependent on the inclination and orientation of the building component,
• air temperature [°C],
• relative humidity (0..1),
• mean barometric pressure [hPa],
  over the calculation period,
• atmospheric counterradiation [W/m²],
  if radiation cooling is to be accounted for during the night.

For each time step, WUFI reads these data from a climate file. Since the rain load and the radiation flux are directional quantities, they must be evaluated in dependence of the orientation and inclination of the building element. This evaluation can be done with a preprocessor or by WUFI itself during the calculation.

In the former case, the preprocessed data are written to a file of *.KLI type, in the latter case WUFI expects climate data in *.WET or *.TRY or *.DAT or *.IWC or *.WBC or *.WAC format.

You can create files with your own data in any of these formats in order to use them with WUFI.

Climate data and the climate file formats are further discussed in the topic Climate Data.