Building Information Modeling approach to optimize energy efficiency in educational buildings

Abstract The high amount of energy consumption demanded by buildings entails the worsening of several environmental issues. Therefore, actions to make use of this resource more efficient become necessary. The most used methods of Building Energy Modeling (BEM) designated to assess the functionality of such actions are excessively complex and, in many cases, generate unreliable results. Thus, this work aims to elaborate an approach based on Building Information Modeling (BIM) to improve energy efficiency in buildings in a simplified and user-oriented manner. For this purpose, a case study was developed in which two classrooms of an educational building, located in the Amazon region – Brazil, were subjected to three-dimensional modeling and energy simulations in BIM software. In addition to evaluating the classrooms´ current performance regarding daylight, thermal conditions and energy consumption, such simulations intended to assess the implantation of two strategies that sought to reduce energy consumption and maintain thermal and visual comfort by taking advantage of daylight and natural ventilation. Besides of energy saving, such strategies were chosen as they promote Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) and help to mitigate the indoor transmission of infectious agents, which is fundamental due to the COVID-19 pandemic scenario, especially in educational environments. The results showed that the strategy based on daylight contribution generated energy savings of around 8% for one of the rooms, and 12% for the other, while the one that exploited the use of natural ventilation was able to reduce energy consumption by about 7% for one of the rooms, and 9% for the other. Therefore, this research presents an important contribution as it provides an intelligible workflow that makes the energy simulation process friendlier and more intuitive and that was able to generate plausible results using BIM-BEM interoperability.