Product Updates

Earlier today, we upgraded Sefaira Concept to v1.1.3, with several key new features.

Here are some of the more significant changes included in this release:

• Specifying Spaces and Diversity Factors - giving you an easy way to sub-divide your building into multiple spaces and uses
• New Strategies - including window shading through awnings and vertical projections
• Results/Report Page - with many more graphs for your presentation
• Improved Concept Comparison - with auto-scaling of charts
• Unit Conversions for US users - automated conversions to W/ft2 and kBtu for US users

Specifying Spaces and Diversity Factors
With this release we have introduced the capability to define space uses for a building. This feature allows you to quickly develop a space use profile to reflect a program requirement for a new or existing building, which includes occupancy, lighting, plug loads and set points, as well as accompanying weekday and weekend schedules. For instance, you can now quickly define use characteristics for a tower that is 80% residential and 20% retail. To make this painless, Sefaira has created defaults for several space use types. These are automatically picked when you select a use type from the drop down. Should you wish to tailor any of the space characteristics, they can all be fully customised to your project.

 

Thermal Zones
This feature also serves as an important step towards letting you simulate different conceptual thermal zones or blocks such as single zone, perimeter-core; and optionally create thermal blocks around space uses. The thermal zones feature will be released later this summer.

How do you use this new feature?
This feature appears on every new project you create, or by clicking on the Building dropdown, as shown below.

Green Building Strategies
Reorganization of strategies
To make navigation easier for you, we have reorganized strategies. Now you can test all water strategies from the fixtures dimension.
New strategies for your projects
We have added new strategies in the envelope dimension, which include window shading through awnings and vertical projections.

Results/Report Page
By popular request, we’ve added all of our Concept charts to the Concept Report page, as you can see below.

Improved Concept Comparison
We've made comparison of the results of two different concepts easy, as the y-axes on the charts now auto-scale to allow for easy visual comparison. Just click on two or more concepts, and click the compare button to see which one performs better.

Improved floor area calculation
We made a significant improvement in our SketchUp import algorithm. This will improve the accuracy of floor area calculation for buildings with complex geometries such as tapering massings, or massings with multiple towers. The algorithm now splices through the massing at heights of 3.5m and finds the areas of resulting polygons to capture the overall floor area of an early stage massing.

As an example, for a massing which has two towers which evolve as they are extruded, the improved parser will calculate resulting floor areas based on splicing, and the resulting floor area will be the sum of all areas shown in green.

Shortly, we plan to introduce the ability for you to specify your own floor to floor heights for buildings, to increase the flexibility of our SketchUp import algorithm.

Unit Conversions for US users
We have added two new units to facilitate use of Concept for our US users. We now have automated conversions to W/ft2 for power densities and kBtu for energy use. Please let us know if you have suggestions or requirements for additional units for use in your projects.

We've also fixed a few bugs:
While enhancing the engine, we came across a relatively minor discrepancy in the scheduling module. This bug affected internal gains calculation where the last hour of schedule was ignored by the engine in some cases. This manifested itself as a minor (~ 1%) discrepancy in cooling and heating energy use for most buildings. The new space uses and schedules module fixes this error while enhancing the app’s usability.

Webinars
We'll be starting our new lunch Webinar series in the coming weeks, to let you learn more about Sefaira from the comfort of your home or office. Invitations will be mailed separately.

What do I need to do to enjoy all these new features?
If you already have a Sefaira Concept Beta account, all you have to do is to log into the application. We’ve updated everything for you – no need to install anything. If you don’t already have an account, go to http://apps.sefaira.com/ and click ‘register’. We will then send you an email with registration details.

I hope you will enjoy this new release just as much as we enjoyed making it. Looking forward to your comments and feedback.

Peter Leonard Krebs
Sefaira CTO