Living Lab Twin²Sim and Equipment

Twin²Sim office building

Living Lab Twin²Sim

Twin²Sim is an experimental building operated by Salzburg University of Applied Sciences at the Kuchl campus. It consists of a building-envelope test rig, an experimental building, and a handling hall.

The test rig supports holistic multiphysics analysis of building envelopes and building services. Short-term investigations (3 to 9 months) at the building-envelope test rig can be combined with long-term investigations of the same prototypes in the experimental building.

The experimental building also serves as an office building and includes four test rooms and a multifunction lab. Two test rooms primarily support investigations of building services systems and their effects on people and space. In the other two test rooms, we can fully dismantle and replace the façades with units that match the dimensions used at the test rig. This allows test specimens to be examined over longer periods (several years) in interaction with space and its users.

A fifth room serves as a multifunction lab for small-scale tests and measurements on small prototypes or devices.

More information about Twin²Sim is available here:

Scientific Software

Building Physics

  • GEQ (energy performance certificate software)
  • WUFI 2D (hygrothermal simulation)
  • HTflux (building-physics software for high-resolution 2D simulations of heat and moisture transport)

Mechanics

  • Autodesk Inventor (in development)

Life Cycle Assessment

  • openLCA

Building Simulation

  • IDA Indoor Climate and Energy (IDA ICE) (detailed, dynamic, multi-zone simulations of indoor climate and whole-building energy use)

Flow Simulation

  • Ansys Fluent

3D Freeform Modeling and Algorithm Editing

  • Rhino
  • Grasshopper

Geoinformatics and Spatial Simulation

  • ArcGIS Enterprise
  • FME
  • QGIS

Measurement

Acoustics

  • Sinus Soundbook
  • Messmikrofone
  • sound sources: Dodekaeder und Normhammerwerk

Thermal comfort

  • Thermal comfort measurement stands (Testo, Almemo)
  • Additional measurement equipment

General measurement equipment

  • Measurement kits for capturing digital and analog signals with integration into the central measurement database
  • Almemo measurement devices with integration into the central measurement database
  • Testo measurement devices
  • Calibrated Fluke multimeters
  • Gossen calibrator for voltage, current, and resistance values
  • Sensors for radiation; heat flux; air, fluid, and surface temperature; air, material, and surface humidity; flow; displacement and deformation, current, and voltage
  • Thermal imaging cameras

Monitoring:

  • Detaillierte Monitoring-Systeme auch mit kundenspezifischen Regelungsstrategien

Calibration:

  • Wet- and dry-block calibrator for temperature sensors and the temperature sensor in combination probes
  • Calibration of humidity probes and humidity sensors in combination probes in climate chambers, and heat-flux sensors on a plate heater (in collaboration with the Department of Design and Green Engineering at Salzburg University of Applied Sciences)