DESCRIPTION

A screen of SIMEDIF

SIMEDIF is a design tool to calculate the hourly air temperature inside the spaces of a building, the hourly surface temperature of walls, and the hourly auxiliary heating/cooling energy that is needed to maintain the spaces at a constant setpoint temperature.  It allows you to analyze the building behavior in different climatic conditions, to detect problems of thermal comfort (overheating or low temperatures), to evaluate possible alternatives in the design of a building, such as variations in its geometry, orientation, location and size of glazed areas, structure and materials of the envelope, the addition of passive and hybrid systems, etc. In existing buildings the software can be used to validate the building model through measured data, or to quantify the effectiveness of possible alternatives for redesign.

Early SIMEDIF was born in 1984 at the Institute for No Conventional Energy Research (INENCO, UNSA-CONICET) of the National University of Salta and CONICET, Argentina, as a DOS software. The original programming language was the old GW-Basic. It was used in the ’80 by research groups around the country.  The number of buildings modeled, monitored and successfully simulated by SIMEDIF grew along the years, due to the good results of the predictions agains measured datsa, and as a consequence its use quickly spread to several research groups in Argentina and other countries. As a result of this effort, SIMEDIF became a software easy-to-use (and lern) , without the complexity of other (very good and complete) existing softwares. It is an ideal tool for non-experienced users and an excellent tool for teaching. Because of that, it is used also in PhD and Master courses.

This version for Windows was developed by Dr. Silvana Flores Larsen at INENCO (Research Institute of Non-Conventional Energy, U.N.Sa.-CONICET). The original 1984 version for DOS was developed by Drs. Graciela Lesino, Luis Saravia and Dolores Alía. The present version is an adaptation of the original Spanish version made with VisualBasic 6. Currently, a new one is being developed in Python, which will include improvements and new modules for comfort calculation, green walls, and so on. All suggestions for improvements are welcome. You can send your comments, contributions and observations.