Monday, September 27, 2010

Autodesk Blogger Day: CEA Tools

What are CEA tools you ask?

"Conceptual Energy Anaylsis" - (CEA)

The point of these tools was to make it easier to run early energy analysis of building designs, and primarily various massing options of a building. It is important to note that Autodesk's internal (cloud based) analysis (GBS / DOE2) is great for the 30,000' view of building energy analysis. However, what is particularly nice is that these tools result in a much cleaner gbXML export that what you typically get from Revit now. The problem with Revit as it is now, is that the gbXML output is derived from rooms or spaces, and often results in errors. With the CEA tools you can fully control the volumes that you are going to analyze, which also means that you can create a more simplified "zone" model of a building for export to more detailed energy analysis programs. For instance if you want to use IES, and your design is in DD, you can be a simplified mass that represents the overall building form and major zones, based upon the DD model, and export the gbXML to IES. This is a bit of a manual process, but results in a cleaner, better model for use in IES, Ecotect or Equest.

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