Achieving passive design is a sophisticated process that involves the right products coalescing to achieve best results in a specific environment, which can be somewhat of a guessing game without being able to access true performance. However, Katrin Klingenberg, executive director of Passive House Institute US (PHIUS), has championed the development of a climate-specific modeling tool to arrive at passive design.
The software—developed by Fraunhofer IBP, PHIUS, and Owens Corning and recognized as a HIVE 100 Top Innovation in 2016—can dramatically improve the quality and efficiency of passive building design and certification to promote the health, comfort, and durability of high-performance buildings.
In this short video, Klingenberg describes how the industry needs innovation and how this tool can help the industry achieve new ways to design passive products. She explains that users can use the tool to select products based on their R-value, add them to a design, and then see how it affects the true performance of the structure in real time.
As she explains it, the tool has standards built into it, so it performs like a verification tool. For instance, as an architect specifies windows and mechanical systems, the tool can help them understand the best combination of those factors and how they work with everything else that goes into the building envelope.
With the ability to do that, designers will be able to start experimenting with new and different combinations of product, which may lead to new results and better performing homes. And, as Klingenberg points out, this may be necessary. She says the industry is routinely setting new, higher standards for sustainable building that necessitate doing things differently.
This particular modeling tool has databases for carbon emissions and energy performance for many different projects that it pulls from to help a project find the right energy balance. Because the designer doesn’t have to limit their foresight to incorporating one particular product that may have seemed critical to regulations, they can then have greater freedom to design.
More tools and new technologies are coming on board to make these decisions easier and make the design more cost-effective and higher performing. The metrics are then considering the holistic design rather than the selection of individual products.
Because the tool can give solutions on demand, the architect can react just as quickly to spur innovation, which Klingenberg coins as an “energy-balancing method.” She says the most exciting achievement for the modeling tool to date is the uptake of these passive building codes in affordable housing.
