Published 04/13/2022
Designing buildings to meet ever-increasing sustainability goals is becoming more complex. Building designers must consider owner needs, green certification requirements, carbon reduction mandates, and ever-changing local codes and standards. At the same time, optimizing for both energy efficiency and cost efficiency in construction and operation inevitably leads to difficult decision-making and many trade-offs, leading many designers to rely on rules of thumb and historical best practices. But as new building technologies and procedures emerge to achieve decarbonization goals, relying on rules of thumb when selecting from hundreds of glazing materials and many different HVAC system types, for example, often leads to suboptimal outcomes. Designers need tools to make the design optimization process more efficient by identifying the optimal outputs given hundreds of design choices. Enter cove.tool, which offers an energy analysis and cost-optimization platform for the AEC industry.
enVerid is excited to announce a new partnership with cove.tool to incorporate ASHRAE’s IAQ Procedure (IAQP) ventilation calculations and enVerid’s Sorbent Ventilation Technology® into their building analysis tool, making it easier for architects and engineers to model energy efficiency and cost benefits of a performance-based ventilation design.
With software that enables a data-driven approach for the selection of all materials and components that go into new and existing building projects, cove.tool’s analysis.tool allows architects and engineers to enter or import building geometry, construction materials, and location to create a baseline energy model using common building control and mechanical systems. Once the baseline model is created, the optimization tool helps users find the most cost-effective façade materials, HVAC equipment, and control system to meet energy code, LEED, and other voluntary building standard requirements.
cove.tool’s platform provides cutting edge design, energy, and cost optimization tools for architects and engineers. enVerid Sorbent Ventilation Technology (SVT®) is used to filter gaseous contaminants from indoor air. Combining SVT with the IAQP improves indoor air quality, reduces peak heating and cooling loads to help electrify buildings, and reduces ventilation energy use intensity (EUI) to reduce carbon emissions and lower operating costs. These benefits are now easy to model using cove.tool.
Because HVAC is responsible for roughly one-third of commercial building energy intensity, ventilation rate calculations and HVAC system selections are among the most impactful decisions designers and engineers make during the design process in terms of first costs, operating costs, and energy efficiency. These decisions also have a big impact on indoor air quality (IAQ), which has become a much bigger focus because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Incorporating air cleaning into the ventilation system design can significantly impact cost, energy efficiency, and IAQ goals.
Most engineers base their ventilation calculations on the Ventilation Rate Procedure (VRP) within ASHRAE Standard 62.1, “Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality”. Under the VRP, ventilation rates are determined based on floor area and design occupancy to achieve “acceptable IAQ”. Most energy modeling and load calculation tools use VRP as the default formula for calculating ventilation rates.
The VRP has shortcomings, however. Chief among them, it does not offer a direct way to design to enhanced IAQ targets and it does not account for the efficiency of air cleaning systems to clean indoor air when determining outside air ventilation rates. These shortcomings are addressed by the IAQP within Standard 62.1. The IAQP is also allowed in the ventilation chapter in the International Mechanical Code.
According to the ASHRAE 62.1-2019 User’s Manual, “The IAQP may allow for a more cost-effective solution to providing good air quality, as all design strategies may be considered and compared…” These design strategies include “source control, air cleaning, or dilution of indoor contaminants with outside air.” Because it is performance-based, “The IAQP allows ventilation air to be reduced below rates that would have been required by the VRP if it can be reliably demonstrated that the resulting air quality meets the required criteria” set out in Addendum aa to 62.1-2019 or more stringent IAQ targets based on project IAQ goals. Often, the use of air cleaning with recirculation allows for a reduction in outdoor air required with a concurrent reduction in heating and cooling capacity and operational energy costs.
According to ASHRAE 62.1, Section 6.1, “Although the intake airflow determined using each of these approaches may differ significantly…any of these approaches [the VRP or the IAQP] is a valid basis for design.”
Recent updates to ASHRAE 62.1 make the IAQP much easier to apply. And now cove.tool has made it possible for designers and engineers to see the benefits of using the IAQP with enVerid’s SVT through simple selections in cove.tool’s building analysis.tool.
Using a simple drop-down selection in analysis.tool, users can now choose between VRP-based ventilation rates or IAQP-based ventilation rates with SVT (as shown in the screen shot below).
This new selection option allows architects and engineers to easily compare energy, emission, and cost metrics using the VRP and IAQP early in the design process. The calculations account for the cost of SVT air cleaning modules applied with the IAQP option, which are often offset by savings from reduced overall peak heating and cooling requirements, and ongoing energy cost savings for lower ventilation energy use. As shown in the following screen shot, the analysis.tool also allows users to compare approaches based on overall project Energy Use Intensity (EUI) and LEED points.
In many cases, using the IAQP with SVT can reduce whole building EUI by up to 20%, while also reducing building energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. By applying LEED’s performance-based indoor air quality design and assessment pilot credit with an IAQP-based design, projects can also earn up to 7 additional LEED points.
With cove.tool, seeing these benefits of using the IAQP with SVT has never been easier.
cove.tool also makes incorporating IAQP with SVT selections easy for designers and engineers. Through the cove.tool chat feature users may request more information about the IAQP and be connected with enVerid’s team of expert application engineers. enVerid’s in-depth online IAQP calculator designed for zone by zone ventilation calculations can be found here on the enVerid website (please contact us to request access).
To learn more about the IAQP, SVT and modeling using cove.tool, watch this recorded webinar.
Joseph Maser
Application Engineer, enVerid Systems
