From Solar Energy vol 82 issue 11, 2008: Long-term performance calculations based on steady-state efficiency test results: Analysis of optical effects affecting beam, diffuse and reflected radiation, by Pedro Horta, Maria João Carvalho, Manuel Collares Pereira, Wildor Carbajal There are a growing number of commercially available solar thermal collector types: flat plates, evacuated tubes with […]
I often need to edit files on remote machines or on embedded devices, that is, machines without a monitor and on which a proper editor might not necessarily be installed. In the past that has always left me with the rather painful choice between vi and nano. Now I have never invested enough time in […]
This week I started reading Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen, the well-known book on presentation design and guidelines. (I’ve borrowed it from our library after waiting for something like 9 months. There were about 10 reservations before mine, so I guess it must be popular.) On page 61 there’s a nice list of questions one should […]
I have sort of a love-hate relationship with MATLAB, and always had since I read its tutorial in January 2003. On one hand it’s a proprietary closed-source system, which in my book rules it out for any scientific work. My one and only encounter with a Mathworks sales representative did nothing to help my misgivings. […]
We met again on November 3 to discuss recent events in the field of building simulation and automation. This time we were joined by Adil Rasheed, a PhD student at LESO-PB working on the so-called “meso scale modelling of urban heat island effect.” David Daum and Antoine Guillemin were the other participants, besides yours truly. […]
The following articles from the last issue of Journal of Building Physics will probably be of interest to building simulationists and automationists. Accuracy of Energy Analysis of Buildings: A Comparison of a Monthly Energy Balance Method and Simulation Methods in Calculating the Energy Consumption and the Effect of Thermal Mass, by Timo Kalema, Gudni Jóhannesson, […]
The following articles from the last issue of Energy and Buildings are probably of interest to building simulationists and automationists. Comparison between detailed model simulation and artificial neural network for forecasting building energy consumption, by Alberto Hernandez Neto and Flávio Augusto Sanzovo Fiorelli. There are several ways to attempt to model a building and its […]
LXML is an amazing Python module that picks up where the standard xml.dom(.minidom) left off. It’s basically a set of wrapper code around the libxml2 and libxslt libraries, and provides functionality missing in Python’s standard library, including XML validation and XPaths. On a project I’m currently working on I needed a good XML library for […]
After a two-month hiatus, we resumed our monthly meetings at LESO-PB to discuss recent developments in building automation and simulation. Frédéric Haldi, David Daum and yours truly attended. We had a smaller group this time, but that turned out to be a good opportunity for going into more detail about some of the research that’s […]
Recently I stumbled upon a blog entry by Marc Fleury, whom I believe is one of the lead developers on the JBoss Application Server project. In this post he describes his new pet project, OpenRemote, which has of late bloomed into a full blown affair. There’s an official website and the project seems to be […]