The Modelica Buildings Library 10.0.0 and 9.1.1 were released on September 05, 2023.

Version 9.1.1 is backward compatible with 9.1.0, while version 10.0.0 contains various new models.

The following major changes have been done for the Modelica Buildings Library 10.0.0:

  • A package with configurable template models for variable air volume flow systems with control based on ASHRAE Guideline 36 has been added to the package Buildings.Templates.
  • Reduced order building envelope models based on the ISO 13790:2008 Standard have been added. This allows modeling of building envelope heat transfer either with a detailed Modelica multizone model (Buildings.ThermalZones.Detailed), with EnergyPlus via the Spawn coupling (Buildings.ThermalZones.EnergyPlus_9_6_0), or with reduced order models based on ISO 13790 (Buildings.ThermalZones.ISO13790) or based on VDI 6007 (Buildings.ThermalZones.ReducedOrder).
  • Various models for district energy systems have been added to the package Buildings.Experimental. This package includes models for
    • combined heating and cooling district energy systems that operate near ambient temperature (sometimes called 5th generation district energy systems),
    • Energy Transfer Stations (ETS) with all electric plants with heat recovery chillers,
    • ETS with multiple heat pumps (heat recovery as well as air-source heat pumps) and storage, i.e., the so-called Time-Independent Energy Recovery (TIER) plant in (Buildings.Experimental.DHC.Plants.Combined.AllElectricCWStorage),
    • direct and indirect ETS for heating or for cooling, and
    • district steam systems.
  • A package with all major hydronic configurations that are encountered in heating and cooling systems has been added in Buildings.Fluid.HydronicConfigurations. This package also includes automatic sizing of control valves to obtain suitable valve authority.
  • The fan and pump models have been revised, and can now be configured to compute the part load efficiency based on the Euler number.
  • Various new elementary control blocks have been added to the Buildings.Controls.OBC.CDL package to provide a reference implementation of the ASHRAE Standard 231P Control Description Language that is currently being developed. See also obc.lbl.gov.

The library has been tested with Dymola 2023x, OpenModelica 1.22.0-dev (41-g8a5b18f-1), OPTIMICA 1.43.4 and recent versions of Impact.

For a detailed list of changes to Buildings 10.0.0 and 9.1.1, see https://simulationresearch.lbl.gov/modelica/releases/v10.0.0/help/Buildings_UsersGuide_ReleaseNotes.html.

The following changes have been done for BuildingsPy 5.0.0:

  • Added buildingspy.simulate.OpenModelica to support simulation with OpenModelica, and refactored modules for simulation with Dymola and Optimica.
  • In buildingspy/simulate/base_simulator.py, updated separator for MODELICAPATH on Windows.
  • In buildingspy/simulate/base_simulator.py, added support for libraries with encrypted top-level package.moe file.
  • Corrected bug in buildingspy/development/refactor.py that causes renames to fail on Windows.
  • Corrected bug in buildingspy/development/regressiontest.py in parsing .mos scripts with simulateModel command on multiple lines.
  • Added class buildingspy.development.simulationCompare that compares the simulation performance across tools or git branches.
  • Refactored regression tests for Dymola to allow specifying a time out for each test, and set the default time out to 300 seconds.
  • Add option to exclude simulation of models from Dymola CI tests.

For more information and download of the Modelica Buildings Library and of BuildingsPy, visit https://simulationresearch.lbl.gov/modelica/.