ATLANTA – Eight teams in the second annual ASHRAE Lowdown Showdown worked to find the right dose of designing and modeling to get a health care facility to net zero or below.
The ASHRAE and IBPSA-USA SimBuild 2016: Building Performance Modeling Conference took place Aug. 10-12 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Some 250 people attended the event, which featured more than 100 speakers presenting practical applications of tools, case studies and papers on simulation, research and a deeper dive into current technology.
Held in conjunction with the Conference was the 2016 ASHRAE LowDown Showdown modeling challenge with eight teams and some 80 team members. The teams used currently available software to create their models for the baseline building, a 50,000 square foot, three-story outpatient health care facility in Omaha, Neb.
A list of participants and a summary of their projects can be found at www.ashrae.org/simbuild2016#lowdown.
The larger challenge for the Showdown is to communicate these experiences to the industry at large to others can learn and improve their professional development, he said. Each team was required to produce a results spreadsheet, a poster and a one-page narrative. These items are posted on the challenge's Webpage along with the names of the team members.
In addition to the Lowdown Showdown, the Conference itself featured some 100 presentations, which are available in the on-demand Virtual Conference. To register for the Virtual Conference, visit https://www.ashrae.org/virtualconferences. The cost is $129, ASHRAE members ($179, non-members).
IBPSA-USA is the United States regional affiliate of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA). The mission of IBPSA-USA is to advance and promote the science of building simulation in order to improve the design, construction, operation and maintenance of new and existing buildings in the United States.