SOLENE-microclimate: a tool to evaluate envelopes efficiency on energy consumption at district scale.

The building simulation tools available to evaluate energy consumption are numerous. Nevertheless, the main lack of the majority of these tools is the ability of consider the environment where the studied building is. Moreover, some of them impose strong constraints such as the choice of walls composition limited to several predefined walls or the value of the convection exchange coefficient which can not be modified. The 3D numerical tool SOLENE-Microclimate takes into account the unsteady building thermal behavior using the SOLENE thermo-radiative model, which can (or not) be coupled with the outside airflow computed with the CFD tool Code_Saturne. The main advantage of this tool is the representation of the whole urban environment which can modify both radiation exchanges (short-and long-wave radiation) and meteorological condition outside the building. The urban planning impact can also be evaluated by taking into account green soil, walls and roofs or trees influences. Thanks to all these abilities, building envelopes efficiencies can be evaluated in realistic urbanconfigurations. After a presentation of SOLENE-Microclimate, three examples of projects dealing with the influence of considering or not the environment on envelope balance are exposed: A study of the VegDUD project evaluates the influences of green walls and green roofs on building energy consumption. The project Merrubi studies the influence of both thermal radiation exchanges with environment and wind distribution. The project EVA aims to quantify of the modification of the albedo values several districts. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.