Building Science Digests provide building industry professionals from different disciplinary backgrounds with a concise overview of fundamental building science topics. They were inspired by the Canadian Building Digests produced by the National Research Council of Canada starting in 1960, which in turn drew on a long history of other practice-oriented publications.
BSC Building Science Digests focus on translating theory into practical, usable information. Some address a broad topic such as building enclosure design, while others illustrate the applicability of building science to more specific or specialized issues such as strawbale construction. Building Science Digests are keystone BSC documents, exemplifying the ideas and research approaches that we view as critical to our work
Driving rain on building facades is on of the largest sources of moisture that impacts durability of enclosures. Several approaches to predicting driving rain on buildings have been developed over the last 50 years. Field measurements have been collected on more than a dozen buildings in several different countries. Based on this research, and some CFD modeling studies, simplified approaches have been standardized in a British Standard and German guidelines. This digest consolidates and summarizes this research to provide a practical method for predicting driving rain deposition for a wide range of purposes, but particularly to aid in WUFI modelling and ASHRAE 160P analysis.
Putting metrics on building energy performance is a required step to make any progress on low-energy use and/or “green” buildings. However, there are many confusing and contradictory metrics available; to speak a common language, it is necessary to understand the topics that are behind these measurements. These topics include site vs. source energy, modeled results vs. reality, US average energy use figures, and methods of normalizing energy use. The normalization of energy use intensity (EUI), or dividing by square footage is examined; several significant problems in applying this metric to residential use are demonstrated. Various other metrics are presented, as well as a proposed method to provide all of the useful building energy information in a format that allows normalization by any chosen metric.
