Autodesk Enhances Sustainable Design Capabilities With Acquisition of Ecotect

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SAN RAFAEL, Calif., June 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- As part of its on-going commitment to support the practice of sustainable design and green building in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industries, Autodesk announced another acquisition to improve building performance analysis in the building information modeling (BIM) process. Autodesk announced that it has completed the acquisition of substantially all the assets related to the Ecotect software tools for conceptual building performance analysis from both Square One Research Ltd. and Dr. Andrew Marsh.

The acquisitions of Ecotect and the Green Building Studio assets will support Autodesk's vision to deliver software that enables architects and engineers to design more sustainable projects. With improved building performance analysis capabilities, Autodesk will be uniquely positioned to offer a comprehensive suite of software solutions for sustainable design and analysis, enabling a BIM process that can facilitate cost-effective design and delivery of high-performing, resource-efficient buildings and infrastructure.

The Ecotect tools can measure how fundamental criteria, such as solar, thermal, shading, lighting, and airflow, will affect building performance in the conceptual and detailed phases of design. Their capability to forecast building performance over time better equips architects and engineers to deliver more energy efficient and sustainable building designs.

ECOTECT is a complete building design and environmental analysis tool that covers the full range of simulation and analysis functions required to truly understand how a building design will operate and perform. It finally allows designers to work easily in 3D and apply all the tools necessary for an energy efficient and sustainable future.

ECOTECT: Features in detail

ECOTECT offers a vast range of modelling, visualisation and analysis features. The following links provide detailed information about the different capabilities of the program and how they are implemented and applied.

Autodesk Ecotect can measure how fundamental criteria, such as solar, thermal, shading, lighting, and airflow, will affect building performance in the conceptual and detailed phases of design. This capability to forecast building performance over time better equips architects and engineers to deliver more energy efficient and sustainable building designs.

ECOTECT: Lighting Design

ECOTECT uses the BRE Daylight Factor method for daylighting calculation and the Point-to-Point method for electric lighting. For more detailed analysis you can export your model directly to tools such as DAYSIM and RADIANCE.

Lighting Analysis

ECOTECT now includes a Lighting Wizard to guide you through the process of calculating light and daylight levels in your building.

You can calculate daylight factors and illuminance levels at any points in your model or, as shown above, over the analysis grid.

Geometric and material information in ECOTECT can be exported directly to RADIANCE for a physically accurate lighting simulation.

Using the Radiance Image Viewer that is part of ECOTECT, you can easily generate contoured or false-colour lux and DF images.

Once you have calculated daylight factors in your model, you can use ECOTECT's advanced daylighting features to determine potential savings due to daylight-linked lighting controls or export directly to DAYSIM for a detailed analysis of daylight autonomy.

ECOTECT allows you to edit or import the IES profiles of different lights and luminaires, displaying them directly within the context of your model as you design your lighting system.

These profiles are based on user-definable design illuminance levels set for the zone to which the lights belong, showing illuminance contours as a volumetric boundary at which the required zone illuminance is exactly met by each light.

ECOTECT: Ventilation & Air Flow

ECOTECT allows you to generate both the geometry and analysis grids for export directly to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools such as NIST-FDS, Fluent and WinAir4. After the calculations in these tools are complete, it is then possible to import results back into ECOTECT for display within the context of the original model.

If you set up a 3D analysis grid within your model, ECOTECT can export this information directly to a range of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools, the results of which can then be imported.

Once you have the results imported back into ECOTECT, you can choose many different visualisation and persentation options.

This can even be viewed as volumetrically as you move about in 3D.

The same processes can be used to look at air flow both through and around buildings or complex urban environments.

Prevailing Winds

Using data in the hourly weather file, ECOTECT can overlay wind speed and direction directly on top of the current model, making it especially relevant to natural ventilation and wind shelter strategies. This plot can also show temperature, humidity and rainfall, over any date and time range.

Plots of prevailing winds from weather data, showing annual wind frequency and speed (left) and summer wind temperatures (right).

Ventilation

The thermal analysis routines in ECOTECT are based on the CIBSE Admittance Method which does not require detailed air-flow and ventilation information. However, as you can see from the Thermal Gallery page, ECOTECT can be used as a pre and post processor for external computational fluid dynamics tools that fully consider air flows.

You may also be interested in the gallery pages, for more examples of ECOTECT in action.

• Shadows & Reflections
• Shading Design
• Solar Analysis
• Lighting Design
• Right-to-Light
• Acoustic Analysis
• Thermal Analysis
• Ventilation & Air Flow
• Building Regulations
• Resource Management
• Visualisation & Import / Export
• Gallery
• Screenshots

Upgrades For Existing License Holders

Version 5.60 uses a very different license system, however you should be able to upgrade quite easily. If you go to http://ecotect.com/support , near the top should be a link with a title relating to finding your lost activation details. The resulting page will show you how to obtain your new activation code and download the very latest version that you can activate.