OpenStudio/Building Component Library

The Building Component Library (BCL) is the U.S. Department of Energy's comprehensive online searchable library of energy modeling building blocks and descriptive metadata. Novice users and seasoned practitioners can use the freely available and uniquely identifiable components to create energy models and cite the sources of input data, which will increase the credibility and reproducibility of their simulations.

The BCL contains components which are the building blocks of an energy model. They can represent physical characteristics of the building such as roofs, walls, and windows, or can refer to related operational information such as occupancy and equipment schedules and weather information. Each component is identified through a set of attributes that are specific to its type, as well as other metadata such as provenance information and associated files.

The BCL also contains energy conservation measures (ECM), referred to as measures, which describe a change to a building and its associated model. For the BCL, this description attempts to define a measure for reproducible application, either to compare it to a baseline model, to estimate potential energy savings, or to examine the effects of a particular implementation.

The BCL currently contains more than 30,000 components and measures. A search API has been implemented on the BCL that allows users to filter through the search results using various facets. Facet categories include component and measure types, data source, and energy modeling software type. All attributes of a component or measure can also be used to filter the results. Visit the NREL BCL tags and attributes page for a complete list of tags used to categories the content and attributes that can be used to narrow down search results. The API Documentation page has API syntax guidance as well as search and download examples.

Contributing

The BCL uses GitHub repositories to manage component and measure content from various users. The Contribute Data page guides users through the process of:

1. creating components and measures,
2. gathering them into a GitHub repository,
3. registering the repository with the BCL Manifest, and
4. configuring a webhook to automatically send content to the BCL when a release is made on the repository.

Miscellaneous Guides

• Creating New BCL Repository

Important Repositories

While there are 8 total repositories on the Building Component Library GitHub page, 5 of these repositories contain data, and measures that provide utility for OpenStudio and EnergyPlus simulations.

• bcl-manifest
  • This repository contains a manifest of all GitHub repositories that provide content to the BCL. Repositories can either be component or measure type repositories. Attributed repositories must be public and are hosted on GitHub.com.
• nrel-components
  • Contains the bulk of the BCL components generated by NREL. Location-Dependent Components such as weather files and design days are stored in separate repositories. Components generated during the TPEx to BCL conversion are stored in the TPEX Components repository.
• design-day-components-1
• design-day-components-2
• location-dependent-components

OpenStudio

The BCL provides users of OpenStudio with a wealth of schedules, building materials. Generally speaking, the BCL provides both measures (see OpenStudio/OpenStudio Measure) and components in .idf and .osm file formats.

External References

• NREL BCL Website

Notes

This page is OpenStudio documentation. Full documentation is available at the OpenStudio website. All articles in the OSArch wiki related to OpenStudio can be seen in the OpenStudio Category