Category: Tag: Energy3D
Figure 1. Global insolation pattern from Pole to PoleThe Sun’s power drives the climate of the Earth. Accurately modeling the incident solar radiation, namely, insolation, at a given location is important to the design of high-performance buildings. As…
Figure 1 As it travels through the atmosphere of the Earth, the light from the Sun interacts with the molecules in the air and are scattered or absorbed, causing the radiation energy that ultimately reaches the ground to weaken. This effect is more significant in early morning or late afternoon than at noon because sunlight […]
Add any number of sensors to a house.According to Wikipedia, computer-aided engineering (CAE) is typically done through the following steps:Pre-processing: This step defines the 3D geometry, the initial conditions, and the boundary conditions of the mo…
Many people know that south-facing windows can help to heat a house in the winter because they let a lot of sunlight in. Exactly how much of the south-facing wall should we allocate to windows? What are the downsides? How can we avoid them? Our Energy3D software allows students to explore the problems and find […]
Energy3D (Tree image credit: SketchUp Warehouse and Ethan McElroy)A zero-energy building is a building with zero net energy consumption over a year. In other words, the total amount of energy used by the building on an annual basis is equal to or even …
Cormac Paterson is a student at Arlington High School. We ran into him last year while conducting research in the school. He quickly mastered our Energy3D CAD software. In as short as just five class periods, he came up with three different architectur…
Figure 1The International Journal of Engineering Education published our paper (“A Time Series Analysis Method for Assessing Engineering Design Processes Using a CAD Tool”) on learning analytics and educational data mining for assessing student perform…
A student designIn a pilot study conducted in December 2012, high school students in an engineering class used our Energy3D CAD tool to do an urban solar design project — they must consider the sun path in four seasons and the existing buildings in th…
Design a city block with Energy3D.We were in a school these two weeks doing a project that aims to understand how students learn engineering design. This has been a difficult research topic as engineering design is an extremely complicated cognitive pr…
Looking for free tools to teach engineering design in K-12 classrooms? We are pleased to announce that Energy3D Version 1.0 is now available for free download at http://energy.concord.org/energy3d. Energy3D is a computer-aided design and fabrication to…