NEWS Archives - L'hypercube

Dans la continuité des stages de Marc ALECIAN (2021), puis Mina CHAPON (2021), un outil Python a été développé pour calculer les facteurs de formes de rayonnement entre « facettes » planes.

Incontournables dans la détermination de la température moyenne radiante, les facteurs de formes sont un paramètre de première importance dans la détermination du confort thermique, notamment pour le rayonnement CLO & GLO (Courtes Longueurs d’Ondes and Grandes Longueurs d’Ondes – plus d’explications sur la page dédiée : Calcul de la MRT).

Après avoir été présenté à la conférence IBPSA France 2022, le code est désormais disponible sur Gitlab : https://gitlab.com/arep-dev/pyViewFactor et sur PyPi avec un simple pip install pyviewfactor !

La documentation complète de la librairie est accessible here.

blog section, Publication

IBPSA France 2022

25 May 20223 January 2023 Mateusz Bogdan

AREP L'hypercube attended the IBPSA France 2022 conference (at Châlons-en-Champagne, may 19th-20th), to present a paper entitled " Computation of View Factors between polygons - Application to urban thermal and comfort studies« .

Des travaux sont en cours pour rendre ces codes open-source, sous forme de librairie Python : pyViewFactor

Abacus of VF between a wall and an individual (cylinder)

Comparison of surface temperatures with and without taking into account the exact view factors

MRT computation with view factors

blog section, Publication

The PET comfort index included to the pyThermalComfort Python library

20 April 202225 May 2022 Édouard Walther

Our version of the Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET) comfort index, published in 2018 in Building&Environment has made it to pythermalcomforta project from the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley (amongst others S. Tartarini & S. Schiavon)

pyThermalComfort includes many other comfort metrics (PMV/PPD, SET, DR... a bit lost? A recap here) and the steady state PET is naturally added for a wider diffusion of this reference model.

Outdoor Comfort levels at Paris Austerlitz train station

8 February 20223 January 2023 Édouard Walther

Une étude couplée de comfort au vent et d’îlot de chaleur urbain dans le cadre du projet de site de Paris Austerlitz :

évaluation du confort aux horizons actuel et 2050
détermination de l’apport lié à la végétation sur le confort dans les espaces extérieurs

blog section, Projects

National Grand Prize for Engineering - Syntec

5 November 20213 January 2023 Mateusz Bogdan

L'hypercube is proud to have contributed to the Grand Prix National de l'Ingénierie 2021, won by AREP teams, for the transformation project of the Saint-Michel Notre-Dame station (RER C).

For the hypercube, it is the recognition of the Air Quality expertise, born during this project in 2017.
After preliminary study phases that were marked by the development of predictive models of air quality in train stations and a fruitful collaboration with the CSTB allowed us to develop a simulation framework to estimate the ventilation induced by train passages ("piston" effect),the main driving force of the air quality improvement on this project.

Subsequently, we had to deal with other site constraints, such as acoustics and flood control. It is precisely this collective and iterative work of the different engineering departments that was rewarded by the GPNI!

Below is a video presentation of the main challenges of the project:

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World UTCI and MRT

23 September 20206 January 2023 Mateusz Bogdan

A "new" database has been made available by the EU, from the Copernicus project (free access, login required).

UTCI and $T_{MRT}$ , August 31st, 2018

This dataset provides a complete historical reconstruction of the UTCI (Universal Thermal Confort Index, a thermal comfort index as well as the MRT (Mean Radiant Temperature, essential for the thermal comfort) depuis 1979 jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Ces paramètres sont calculés par le modèle ERA5-HEAT (Human thErmAl comforT). Il s’appuie sur des réanalyses d’observations planétaires qui permettent d’avoir une description cohérente et complète du climat à la surface de la terre, ainsi que de son évolution.

Technical data:

DATA DESCRIPTION
Data type	Gridded
Horizontal coverage	Global except for Antarctica (90N-60S, 180W-180E)
Horizontal resolution	0.25° x 0.25°
Vertical resolution	Surface level
Temporal coverage	1979-01-01 to near real time for the most recent version.
Temporal resolution	Hourly data
File format	NetCDF
Conventions	Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Convention v1.6
Versions	UTCI v1.0
Update frequency	Intermediate dataset updated daily in near real time, Consolidated dataset monthly updates with 2-3 month delay behind real time.

blog section, Publication

IBPSA 2019

13 September 20196 January 2023 Mateusz Bogdan

Thermal comfort and the simulation of natural ventilation, for us that means a lot! Our researchers Edouard WALTHER and Antoine HUBERT presented their latest advances at the IBPSA World #bs2019 conference in partnership with École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay.

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160 Cores dedicated to building physics

8 March 20196 January 2023 Mateusz Bogdan

Since 2017, The Hypercube has been performing detailed airflow simulations and implementing numerical optimization procedures. These methods require significant computing power, which until now has been provided by "virtual machines" in Microsoft's Azure cloud. The team thus had 24 bodybuilt "machines" (8 ultra-clocked logic cores and 56 to 112 GB of RAM), switched on on demand and allowing a high reactivity.

This solution, which has been in use for 2 years, limited us in terms of reactivity (IT maintenance) and connectivity (data transfer speed) with a non-negligible associated cost.

The question then arose, with the AREP IT team, of an opportunity to invest in an "on-premises" calculation server... It is now done! It has just been delivered, in kit form.

It is therefore a computing rack with 4 processors, 20 cores each capable of hyperthreading (virtualization of a second core), in other words, 160 cores dedicated to simulating building physics phenomena! This represents the equivalent of more than 25 high-performance computers (for example for 3D visualization).

Today, this "beast", with 256 GB of RAM memory, extensible up to 3TB, runs on the open source Linux operating system (Debian 9).

Many thanks to AREP IT Services for their advice, support and energy!

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Autonomous measurement station

4 February 201919 October 2021 Édouard Walther

An autonomous measuring station for diagnosis

Resulting from a partnership of more than two years between AREP and the electrical engineering speciality of the INSA of Strasbourg, here is an autonomous measuring station, started during previous projects (see L'Hypercube references) which was finalized in January 2019 thanks to the Technological Research Project of François-Alexandre Fournier, a GE5 engineering student at INSA: we thank him here for his unequalled investment!

Including a Raspberry PI base and low power wireless sensors Whisper node from WISEN, this station was custom developed for AREP's needs and includes a dozen temperature and humidity probes as well as a CO2 sensor. Particular attention was paid to energy consumption and robustness of operation during the project. Field tests are planned for 2019.

[ Autonomous station: Raspberry PI + 868 MHz communication with wireless sensors]