IDA Indoor Climate and Energy

Features in v. 3.0

In the IDA Room wizard, specific manufacturer’s products may be sized and evaluated by accessing web based databases. The figure shows an active beam from the Stifab-Farex range.

The most important improvement for most users is likely to be the treatment of arbitrarily prism shaped zones. Walls can be partly internal, partly external and partly overlapping. Each wall contains information about it’s construction in the different cases and the current location with respect to other zones and facades determines the construction used. A user-defined part of a wall can also have its own construction and connection properties.

The geometry makes it possible to develop an interface with the emerging industry CAD standard IFC. This means that 3D models of entire buildings can be imported, resulting in most significant time savings for the user.

A complete re-design of the old cooling load wizard is included. The present wizard, IDA Room, is used for both cooling and heating load calculation for single rectangular rooms. IDA Room runs in Microsoft Internet Explorer as a separate process and is also available free of charge directly over the Internet. Try it here!

In version 3, several template air handling units are available for direct selection and a building may have multiple AHU’s. Users may also configure their own HVAC systems with arbitrary structure based on an extensive component library.

Some other improvements in 3.0 are:

• Increased number and quality of reports, mainly energy
• Shading calculation for diffuse radiation
• Five-surface skylights in the roof with detailed ray-tracing
• Multiple ventilation systems at the standard level, serving different zones
• Multiple pre-defined air handling units
• Supply air flow beams for cooling and heating
• Waterborne floor heating
• Chimney for natural ventilation
• Awnings controlled by time and wind
• Lights controlled by daylight at workplace
• Time schedules for heat exchanger and boiler
• Leaks through walls and floor at the standard level
• Selectable controllers for room units, PI-regulator as default for cooling units
• Extended resource database, e.g. more glazings and constructions
• Extended climate database