Hi TIG,
we have a new code for energy calculation of non-residential buildings in germany (DIN 18599), which is a national implementation of the EU regulation on "energy efficency in buildings".
In small houses you only had to get the four facades, a few windows, a roof and a floor to describe the building. The new code lists 33 different profiles (single office, group office, classroom, retail, auditorium, hotel room, restaurant, kitchen, archive, workshop,...) with many underlying parameters such as duration of daily use, duration of heating, cooling and air conditioning, temperature, strength of lighting, internal energy sources (persons, PCs, lighting,...).
The problem now is that one building might have between 4 and 10 different zones/usage profiles, so one facade must get splitted and the surface area including windows has to be calculated for each zone. I have done this manually from plans and have written a very complex Excel-sheet to evaluate the zones and get the effective area of walls, ceilings, windows, etc. for each zone. Every surface must be sorted by orientation and type of construction. This data has to be transferred to my energy simulation software.
What I need is a 3D-Editor to build a simplified 3d model (--> Sketchup) and a possibility to group spaces as rooms, assign information to them (profile/zone, ground area, temp, ...) and extract the information into a database. This database must provide 3 to 4 lists (list of zones, list of rooms, list of elements, maybe list of element layers, each including special infos) that can be exported to external software.
To make it a little bit more complicated:
Usually you only have exterior elements which can cause energy losses. But if you have interior elements with different temperatures on each side, you have to consider those, too.
So I need a script, that can not only calculate the area, but also differentiate between areas to outside air, to outside soil, to inside rooms with lower temp, ...
On my wish list would be also a routine that marks geometry problems and a interface to export directly via txt-file into my energy simulation prog.
Okay, that's it in short. Do you think, this is possible?
I don't know anything about Ruby Scripts, but I guess that kind of database would be a bit too complicated...
Looking forward to your answer!
Leo