Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference A. Tolk, S. D. Diallo, I. O. Ryzhov, L. Yilmaz, S. Buckley, and J. A. Miller, eds. TOWARDS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A 3D HEAT TRANSFER ANALYSIS IN DYNAMIC-BIM (DYNAMIC BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING) WORKBENCH Ravi S. Srinivasan Siddharth Thakur Manoj Parmar Ishfak Akhmed M.E. Rinker, Department of Mechanical Sr. School of Construction Management And Aerospace Engineering University of Florida University of Florida Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA Gainesville, Florida 32611, USA ABSTRACT Energy efficient building design demands a complete understanding of building envelope heat transfer along with airflow behavior. Although existing building energy modeling tools provide 2D heat transfer analysis, they fail to execute full-scale 3D heat transfer analysis and lack proper integration with Building Information Modeling BIM tools. This paper addresses these issues first by developing a BIM-integrated plugin tool to extract building geometry and material information from a 3D building model and then demonstrating a complete 3D heat transfer analysis along with grid generation. This paper discusses the preliminary research work in data extraction from Building Information Modeling (BIM) for performing 3D heat transfer in a seamless manner. This approach will help towards the implementation of a 3D heat transfer in Dynamic-BIM Workbench, an integrative, collaborative, and extensible environment. This Workbench enables integration of domain modeling, simulation, and visualization. 1 INTRODUCTION Integration of Building Information Modeling and building simulation tools is a new field of exploration in building science research domain. Although existing BIM tools allow simple energy, daylighting, and airflow analysis, they are not comparable to the typical, full-scale simulations conducted using standalone analysis tools. Currently, auxiliary programs are used to perform such micro-analysis. Moreover, for complete understanding of indoor airflow behavior in conjunction with envelope heat transfer, a robust tool that is seamlessly integrated with BIM is required. This is particularly important for window-wall interfaces and other intersections of envelope components that develop thermal bridges and double-skin façade assessment. While modeling the real world effects of envelope heat transfer and their effect on indoor airflow behavior is one aspect, co-simulation within BIM is another crucial step as several organizations has directed the use of BIM for new and existing buildings. Despite several research efforts, current BIM and building performance tools’ integration are at a level that are particularly nascent and do not contribute to the larger goal of designing low / net zero energy buildings. Two dimensional heat transfer modeling is possible using software such as THERM (2012), but they lack seamless integration with BIM tools. Although research work is in progress to improve the integration of the simulation software with BIM, existing simulation is limited to two- dimensional models. The recently developed Dynamic-BIM Workbench is a unified, interdependent, and interoperable domain that uses Open Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE) for domain modeling, simulation, and visualization for energy and environmental assessments of buildings (Srinivasan et al., 2012, 2013), figures 1 and 2. Using the dynamic linkages available in this Workbench, simulation tools can be linked such that users can perform analyses from within this Workbench. Among others, one of the goals is to develop an integrated tool that can extract all the necessary building information, execute heat transfer analysis, and visualize the results with the provision of flexibility and minimal user effort. This