BB HAMT Demo - Now Available

Better Building used to lean on EnergyPlus, specifically the finite element heat transfer solver that showed up in version 9.5.

It was fine for walls, using the same Kunzel equations that underpin WUFI, but it started falling over for roofs and anything beyond the basics.

The team ended up engineering workarounds just to match capabilities WUFI already had natively, which is the kind of thing you do reluctantly as no one likes a workaround. .

So towards the end of last year they decided to just build their own solver instead of patching around someone else's.

BB HAMT

The result is BB HAMT, a cloud-based heat and moisture solver that's now the only moisture modeling option on the platform (EnergyPlus has been cut over entirely).

It's been validated against the HAMSTAD benchmarks and EN 15026, with results tracking closely against reference temperature and moisture profiles.

Demo Summary

The demo covered:

• Materials: drag-and-drop with hydrothermal data attached, with a private material directory coming for users to manage their own datasets (thermal, moisture, carbon, etc).

• Climate files: upload your own EPW, get automatic data quality warnings (mostly precipitation-related, which is the perennial headache with weather files), plus a "drying potential" view by facade to help you pick your critical orientation before you've even started modeling.

• The input form: analogous to WUFI or Delphin, covering objectives, orientation, run periods, mould growth targets (NCC default of 3), initial conditions, and equilibrium moisture content. Worth noting: the 90% x 2 EMC requirement for concrete is often physically impossible since it exceeds the material's actual moisture storage capacity, so expect to tweak that one.

• Cavity ventilation: dynamic air change modeling based on high/low openings, discharge coefficients, and inlet area.

• Driving rain: 1% source method off the climate file, standard exposure and deposition factors.

• Results: high-level summary reports (mould growth, RH, water content, flux) plus a detailed point-selection tool for pulling hourly data at specific depths within the assembly.