Greenheck Website Features Interactive LEED Worksheet

Greenheck features a new LEED interactive worksheet on its website, http://www.greenheck.com/  to help specifiers determine which Greenheck products will help with the attainment of points in the USGBC LEED Rating Program.

There are hundreds of Greenheck products that are organized and detailed pertaining to various credit qualifications in the Energy & Atmosphere, Materials & Resources, and Indoor Environmental Quality LEED categories. Convenient links are included to product specs, images, and 3D Revit models and manufacturing locations are listed.
For more information, visit http://www.greenheck.com/ and click on Green/LEED.

Autodesk® Green Building Studio® web-based energy analysis software

Autodesk® Green Building Studio® web-based energy analysis software can help architects and designers perform whole building analysis, optimize energy efficiency, and work toward carbon neutrality earlier in the design process. With faster, more accurate energy analysis of building design proposals, architects and designers can work with sustainability in mind earlier in the process, plan proactively, and build better.

• Whole building energy analysis software—Determine virtual building’s total energy use and carbon footprint
• Design alternatives analysis—Consider alternatives to improve energy efficiency
• Detailed weather analysis—Extensive weather data available for project site
• Carbon emission reporting—Emissions reporting for nearly all aspects of the building
• Daylighting—Qualification for LEED® daylighting credit
• Water usage and costs—Estimated water use, in and outside building
• ENERGY STAR® scoring—Scores provided for each design
• Natural ventilation potential—Summarizes mechanical cooling required and estimates hours design could use outdoor air to cool the building naturally

Autodesk Ecotect Analysis includes innovative building energy and carbon analysis tools made available through the Green Building Studio web-based service. The web service provides a user-friendly front end to powerful building energy analysis software. All of the computationally intensive hourly simulations are carried out on remote servers, and the results are provided to you in a web browser. The web-based service will collect data from three sources:

1. Your Revit® software model. All the building geometry comes from your model, including the number of rooms, the connections between rooms, and their relationship to the exterior, exposure, and aspect to the sun; and the shape and total area of built surfaces or openings.
2. Your responses to a few basic questions. In order to explain the building’s use or context, you will need to select a building type from a drop-down menu and enter the project location. You will also have a chance to select a weather station for the project, although the closest one is selected to be the default.
3. Regionalized databases. Based on the above information, the Green Building Studio web service will extract additional information about local weather conditions, construction, and materials. The service will automatically add any information you have not provided, so it can adapt to your requirements as your design evolves.

 Autodesk® Ecotect™ Analysis 2010 software is a comprehensive concept-to-detail sustainable design analysis tool, providing a wide range of simulation and analysis functionality through desktop and web-service2platforms. Powerful web-based whole-building energy, water, and carbon analysis capabilities converge with desktop tools for visualizing and simulating performance of the building model within the context of its environment. Use the desktop tools and web-service functionality together to help create more sustainable designs. This document describes how to access your Green Building Studio web-service account and manage projects, and provides tips to help you get started.

Autodesk acquires Carmel Software Corporation

Autodesk also announced that it has acquired certain assets of Carmel Software, which include their Design-Build, Duct Size, Estimate, Loadsoft, Refrigeration, Residential, and Green Toolbox products. These tools will support Autodesk’s vision for building information modeling (BIM) and strengthen Autodesk’s expanding portfolio of sustainable design solutions.

Carmel Software has been developing and selling HVAC mechanical engineering software since 1995. Carmel's flagship product delivers thermal load calculations that give engineers information to appropriately size a building's HVAC systems. In addition, Carmel's software portfolio includes programs for duct sizing, refrigeration, pipe sizing, estimating, and life-cycle cost analysis. These applications are connected with the Revit platform for BIM via gbXML.

Autodesk is investigating various strategies for integrating Carmel Software expertise and technology into its AEC design solution portfolio. For a brief transition period, while integration plans are finalized, these products will not be available for purchase. It is anticipated that Carmel Software technology will be available from Autodesk in some format in the coming months.

The plans for integrating Carmel Software’s technology into Autodesk’s product portfolio are being investigated at this time. They will be making further announcements in the near future as these plans are finalized. Autodesk anticipates making Carmel Software’s technology available to Autodesk customers through a variety of methods, including but not limited to integrating the technology into its existing solutions.

Both of Carmel Software's HVAC load calculation software programs (Loadsoft 6.0 and Residential 5.0) work with the latest versions of AutoCad MEP 2008 and Revit MEP 2008. AutoCad MEP and Revit are software tools that provide integrated AutoCAD-based building systems design and analysis.

A user can import into Loadsoft and Residential the building information from the AutoCad MEP or Revit drawing, including room dimensions, number of people and much more. Each zone and room in the AutoCad MEP/Revit MEP drawing becomes a system and room in Loadsoft or Residential. After the calculations are performed in the software, the total cooling and heating load results can be exported back to AutoCad MEP or Revit MEP.

The benefits of this integration is that it eliminates the tedious process of manually inputting information for each room and system. . . a process that often takes many hours for large buildings. Another benefit is that all of the cooling and heating load results can be exported back to AutoCad MEP or Revit MEP to aid in duct and piping design.

The Loadsoft and Residential software programs are able to communicate with AutoCad MEP and Revit MEP using the Green Building XML schema (gbXML). gbXML was developed to facilitate the transfer of building information stored in CAD building information models, enabling integrated interoperability between building design models and a wide variety of engineering analysis tools and models available today. See http://www.gbxml.org/ for more information.

Autodesk® to Acquire Green Building Studio®

Green Building Studio announced they have signed an agreement for Autodesk, Inc. to acquire their assets. Green Building Studio (GBS) web service will soon join the Autodesk product family. The GBS team will continue selling, training, and supporting architects as they use the GBS web service to design carbon neutral buildings today and in the future.

“Autodesk is committed to providing technology that makes sustainable design easier and more efficient,” said Jay Bhatt, senior vice president, Autodesk AEC Solutions. “We look forward to adding the Green Building Studio technologies to the Autodesk portfolio and helping our customers more easily leverage the coordinated, reliable data created in the Revit® platform for building information modeling (BIM) to help predict performance and design buildings with reduced environmental impact.”

After closing this deal, Autodesk also plans to continue support for the Green Building Studio web service, carbon neutral building design training, and to strengthen the web service’s integration with its BIM software. The gbXML schema will remain an open industry standard, and the GBS web service will continue to be available to any other BIM software.

“We have partnered with Autodesk for many years, and commend their ongoing support for sustainability,” said John Kennedy, President & CTO, Green Building Studio. “We are eager to contribute our industry expertise in green buildings to drive mainstream adoption of sustainability and accelerate the AEC industry’s transition to carbon neutral buildings.”

The USGBC Drives Green Growth

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) currently has over nine LEED rating systems covering commercial and residential buildings, interiors, and exteriors, all the way up to entire neighborhoods, and several more systems are on the way. Even as LEED continues to proliferate, however, a movement continues among USGBC leadership to make it more unified, scientifically rigorous, and regionally appropriate. First discussed at the Greenbuild Conference in 2006, USGBC announced at Greenbuild 2007 that it would continue to move LEED toward a “bookshelf” of credits while incorporating both structural and technical changes. At the same time, weighting of environmental priorities, life-cycle assessment (LCA), and regional credits all promise to affect LEED and its point structure.

Whereas the original rating system applied only to new construction and was drafted with commercial office towers in mind, LEED has grown so much in popularity and use that new rating systems have been specifically created for different kinds of buildings. There are now LEED standards for existing buildings (focusing on energy-efficient maintenance and nontoxic operations); core and shell (exterior walls and windows, electrical and plumbing systems); commercial interiors (doors and walls, lighting and plumbing fixtures); homes (only for new construction in its pilot phase) and neighborhood developments (for example, a redevelopment zone).

Like any young industry, LEED is evolving rapidly. Lessons learned from pilot projects are used to improve the next version of the standard. Work is now under way on the 3.0 version, which will attempt to assess the environmental impact of a product or material over its complete lifecycle. It’s a difficult and important task, and whatever emerges is guaranteed to generate controversy. But once again, by providing a framework, language, and measurement system for lifecycle analysis, LEED will fuel conversations and spur market growth.

Using BIM for Greener Designs in the Future

When I was at Autodesk University this year, they showed us this video on where the future might take us to giving us "on-the-fly" LEED ratings of a building as design changes and design options are created and modified allowing architects and engineers to find better ways to make a building more efficient.

Designing a Greener Building

The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System is a national standard for developing resource-smart, sustainable buildings. As adoption of the standard grows, many owner/operators are requiring that their new building projects achieve LEED certification, which rates a project based on site design, indoor environmental quality, and efficient use of energy, materials, and water. A high LEED rating recognizes the quality of a green building design and also qualifies the project for an array of state and local government financial incentives – an important benefit for the building owner.

Complex engineering analysis of the design project is critical to achieving LEED certification. Some design firms outsource engineering analysis - as it is time-consuming and costly to do in-house. But now, building information modeling solutions such as the Revit Architecture and Revit MEP provide design models containing the necessary level of detail for the analyses. Design data can be extracted from the building information model and input to various analysis programs. With the recent release of the Green Building Studio from GeoPraxis, Inc., this process has been streamlined to the point where architects and engineers can perform energy analysis in-house, reducing the overall cost of the design process.

Autodesk and the USGBC are committed to a future where design process and technology are integrated in support of our common goal - a sustainable tomorrow. Over the past year, the “Project Chicago:Green Research” team investigated how modeling, analysis, and sustainable validation could converge into an improved design process. Using scenarios from BNIM Architects’ Lewis and Clark State Office Building in Missouri, a research team of experts developed alternative concepts for sustainable design environments and studied their impact on the design process. This video showing the results of this research suggests a compelling future.

Autodesk and the USGBC plan to work on several initiatives to make sustainable design easier and more efficient through the use of technology such as the Autodesk Revit platform for building information modeling (BIM), ultimately reducing the causes of climate change by increasing the number of green buildings that emit less carbon dioxide. As the first step, Autodesk and the USGBC plan to develop an educational curriculum for architecture and engineering students.

As part of the agreement, USGBC and Autodesk will explore opportunities to integrate Autodesk’s technology with the USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, to help the building industry more easily and rapidly meet goals for reduced carbon dioxide emissions. Potential areas for collaboration may include consulting, joint development of new technology initiatives and industry education. To facilitate rapid adoption of sustainable design practices, Autodesk and the USGBC plan to share the knowledge and results of their partnership with the building industry.

Click here to view the Video

This video may include information concerning future technology, but is not intended to reflect any planned or future development efforts or be a promise or guarantee of future delivery of products, services or features.

Click here to download an Autodesk Whitepaper about Greener Designs

The cornerstone of BIM is the high-quality design information it provides. This paper delves into a practical example of how architects can use this information to quickly and accurately perform energy analysis on early-stage building designs, for data that supports construction of "green" buildings.