Ladybug Tools has announced new Dragonfly district thermal system simulation workflows, developed through several years of collaboration with teams at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now the National Lab of the Rockies, around the URBANopt SDK. The new Dragonfly District Thermal components are aimed at feasibility studies for fourth- and fifth-generation district energy systems. ...
For those who haven’t heard of Ladybug Tools before, it is an open source collection of free computer applications that support environmental design and education connecting 3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) interfaces to a host of validated simulation engines. Although Ladybug Tools do ship platform agnostic libraries, it is currently primarily only usable with proprietary tools, but there is a project underway to make it available for Blender. ...
Ladybug Tools has been working hard on creating a new cloud-based environmental simulation platform called Pollination. Pollination is unique compared to other cloud-based environmental simulation platforms in that it doesn’t operate as a black box, and instead operates as a high fidelity task runner for environmental analysis engines. The task descriptions are standardised as a set of nodes, each describing a single step in the analysis process. This is called a “recipe”. Together, these tasks allow environmental simulationists to scale their analysis easily whilst ensuring that the validity of their simulation is never sacrificed. ...