[Equest-users] Questions about shading effect simulation with eQUEST and DOE-2, Hope your help!

[lei lei]

Dear All:
Please excuse me for I'm taking the liberty of sending e-mail to you. I'm a
PHD student of Nagoya University. Could I ask some questions about the
application of simulation tool eQUEST and DOE-2?

In my research, I used the eQUEST to analyze the shading effect from nearby
buildings. However the simulation result seems to be not reasonable. I
wonder whether the eQUEST is suitable for these kinds of shading effect
studies. Could you please give me any suggestions?

The research is about a building in the middle of a parallel layout
buildings group. It is focus on the building shades of nearby buildings. In
order to analyze the energy implication due to shading effect from nearby
buildings, rectangle shades are established nearby the simulated building
with BUIILDING-SHADE. The shading effect is denoted by the absolute
difference between the energy consumption of the building without
surrounding building shades and the building with surrounding building
shades. The same model was applied to a lot of cities (TMY data). It was
found that:

1)      For all the cities, the more the shading effect on space cooling the
less the shading effect on space heating. (But, in fact, for most of cities,
when the solar radiation in summer is much, the solar radiation in winter is
relatively much also.)
2)      the shading effect in some cities with less solar radiation is much
more than that in some cities with more solor radiation.( But in the
documents of DOE-2, only the solar radiation will affect the shading effect,
when all the other situations are same except weather data.)

Could you please give me any suggestion to explain these results? Or are the
DOE-2 and eQUEST not suitable to do these kinds of shading effect analysis?
If so, could you give me any advice about any software can do the simulation
of nearby shading effect on building use?

with best regards,
-- 

yours sincerely,

Lei LEI
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