Origins of whole-building energy simulations for high-performance commercial buildings: Contributions of the 1968 and 1971 ASHRAE algorithms for weighting factor-based hourly heating and cooling load calculations: Fid-Bau Portal

Origins of whole-building energy simulations for high-performance commercial buildings: Contributions of the 1968 and 1971 ASHRAE algorithms for weighting factor-based hourly heating and cooling load calculations

Ahn, Jounghwan / Haberl, Jeff S.

Abstract

This study analyzes the 1968 and 1971 ASHRAE LOADS algorithms and clarifies their significance to the field of building energy simulation programs that first provided publicly available weighting factor-based hourly heating and cooling load calculation procedures and first proposed the concept of precalculated WFs. In addition, this study also finds their significant contributions to developments of many of the first generation of weighting factor-based building energy simulation programs in the 1970’s, which became the forerunners to current whole-building energy simulation programs, such as the eQUEST, DOE-2.1E, TRACE 3D Plus, and HAP programs. Therefore, this study fills a gap in the literature regarding the origins of today’s whole-building energy simulation programs. In the related work (Ahn and Haberl 2024), contributions of the 1975 ASHRAE LOADS algorithms for heat balance-based hourly heating and cooling load calculations are discussed. These two studies extend the previous research (Ahn and Haberl 2023) that analyzed the origins of today’s whole-building energy simulation programs.