The reliability of BEM results is highly dependent on the quality of the inputs. The inputs should match the building design as closely as possible, but there are many instances (such as during early stages of design or in research projects) where design data is not yet available. In these cases assumptions must be made for the inputs. The purpose of the BEMcyclopedia Lookup Tables tool is to provide guidance for making these assumptions.
Internal gains refer to features in a building that generate heat (or act as heat sinks). These may come from occupants (people), lighting, or equipment ("plug loads"). In the case of lighting and plug loads, these loads also consume energy.
Learn more about internal gains and how to input them into a BEM model on the BEMcyclopedia wiki page.
The internal gain lookup tool can be used to view tabular data for different building vintages (when they were designed/built), different building types, and a range of internal gain types and their associated schedules.
Go to the Schedules Lookup Tool
Internal gains are defined as a peak value that varies throughout the day according to an operational schedule. The schedule may vary hourly, may operate differently on different days of the week or holidays, and also have seasonal operational variations. These are captured by a schedule or set of schedules within a BEM model that is associated with the internal gain.
The schedule lookup tool can be used to view tabular and graphical data for different building types, and internal gain types. The schedule tool can also be accessed directly from the internal gain tool by clicking the name of a schedule associated with the internal gain.
Data presented in the lookup tables is from NREL's OpenStudio Standards project. OpenStudio Standards is an automation tool that takes advantage of OpenStudio's Measures capability. It serves a dual purpose of automatically creating a code-compliance baseline model using a detailed set of modeling rules, and also has the capability of automatically generating prototype models.
Portions of the underlying OpenStudio Standards dataset have been parsed and formatted for presentation in these lookup tables.
Disclaimer: This material is for informational purposes only. Refer to the BEMcyclopedia disclaimers for more detail.