Visual programming to the rescue

According to the Danish building code, BR18, you need to verify/simulate how many hours the operative temperature exceeds certain values during the year.

This is not very difficult to determine with post processing once you have the simulated temperature result in a structured way, for example as an Excel table, but what if you want the result in real time during a simulation?

The obvious way would be some coding. To do this you need to define some variables, write the logic and a good understanding of the simulation tool you are using. Not very difficult but still I think a number of people would prefer post processing in Excel.

Still, there is an alternative method, visual programming. As an example, this is the macro a college of mine, Samer Hassanie , wrote yesterday calculating thermal comfort according to the Danish building code using IDA ICE.

To do this we need two signals, the input signal (the operative temperature for each time step of the simulation) and a comparator signal that determines if we should store the time to duration or not. The good thing is that there is a component in IDA ICE called Duration so all we need to do is to get the signals. First, we grab two signals from the simulation, the operative temperature in a room and if the room is occupied or not.

Using visual programming this is just dragging components from a palette and in this example, connecting them by drawing lines.

We split and multiply these signals with two schedules, summer and winter with different selected time intervals. The clever thing about multiplying two signals is that if one of the signals is 0 the resulting signal is also 0. The Duration component contains the different temperature levels that we compare against, so this is it, all we need to do is to write the result to a report, table, or something else and we are done. No coding required at all.