Journal of Korean Institute of Architectural Sustainable Environment and Building Systems ISSN:1976-6483(Print) 2586-0666(Online) 한국건축친환경설비학회논문집

A design tool is proposed that can describe whole hydronic pipelines of a building and thus allows for detailed sizing of piping components. Since a rule-of-thumb method is commonly used in design companies and existing design softwares are not trivial to handle, an intuitive modeling method is implemented in AutoCAD by developing a user-friendly add-on program. Then, a similar calculation algorithm to existing tools is applied using detailed fluid and valves characteristics. Various solutions can be found during simulations that search for proper pipe diameters, valve sizes, and the required pump head among device databases. To validate the proposed tool, a test case is inter-simulated using both the existing Hyselect design program and the traditional rule-of-thumb design method. As a result, the resulting pipe diameter and pump head are highly overestimated with the traditional design method. On the other hand, the proposed model can result in very similar pipe diameter and pump head compared to Hyselect, showing an error of less than 2%.