Introduction to Ladybug Tools pt. II

Over the past few years, we’ve been contributing to Ladybug Tools. Here’s a roundup of our contributions to the Glazing and Winter Comfort Components.

    
Ladybug Tools Contributions
We believe sharing methodologies and making contributions to open source projects. We find it beneficial to participate in an industry that peer reviews itself towards better and better work. This allows us to take ideas, designed in an echo chamber of our own work, to a larger scale. Our Building Science Group has contributed several new components and example files to the open source Ladybug Tools project. One of our biggest contributions to the project included helping to make improvements when using Glazing and Winter Comfort Components.

Glazing + Winter Comfort Components
Those who are familiar with our research know that we have invested a significant amount of time into answering a question that affects nearly all of our projects in cold climates: “what amount of glazing and level of window insulation is suitable for occupant winter comfort in the absence of perimeter heat?” Not only have we developed methods to help us answer this question but we have packaged them all into the Glazing + Winter Comfort Web Tool, which we frequently use to set glazing ratio and U-value targets early in design. However, as soon as we built this web tool, we realized many situations throughout our buildings could not be easily accommodated by the tool’s assumption of a single rectangular façade. In response to these findings, we translated the underlying methods of the web tool into python Grasshopper components and contributed them to the Ladybug project.

Building off the flexibility of Grasshopper’s visual scripting interface and the visualization capabilities already in Ladybug, we built detailed maps of wintertime thermal comfort criteria, which can be generated for nearly any geometry.

These components have enabled us to remove perimeter heat in many more conditions on our projects than we would have been able to remove otherwise. From serrated facades to glazed corners, there was no situation that we could not model!

For a full account of our contribution, you can read the documentation of the individual components that we contributed here:

• Ankle Draft Discomfort
• Steady State Surface Temperature
• Surface View Factors
• Window Downdraft
• And browse through the Glazing and Winter Comfort example files

Related Content
Introduction to Ladybug Tools pt. I