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 can use the building wizard.

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

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

and information about attached unheated zones are required.

If the geometry of the building exceeds the capabilities of the Building Wizards, it can be expanded and changed in the 3D Edit window. Also, a complete construction of the building geometry is possible here. The user can set vertices and connect these points to components. The input of a complex building form is possible.

Climate

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

• 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. 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.