IDA ICE is mainly used to perform detailed thermal building simulations of various types. Still, in the last few years quite a few customers use IDA ICE for daylight simulations, usually daylight factor according to different national building codes, standards, and certification systems. One of the reasons daylight calculations were added to IDA ICE was that once you have a thermal model it can be converted automatically into daylight model. There are also a number of users that only use IDA ICE for daylight simulations. I think the reason is that IDA ICE has many (more or less) unique features, at least combined.
- Glass transmittance can be determined based upon fully spectral glass data from manufacturers.
- Zone/rooms, window- and wall types can be imported directly from BIM-tools using IFC.
- It is very easy to adapt geometry for common building element types, for example drawing windows, doors, vertical walls, and rooms using drawing tools in IDA ICE.
- IDA ICE has a built-in parameter optimization tool to optimize window and balcony size and a lot of other parameters. Optimization can also be combined with thermal simulations, for example overheating and solar heat load.
- Surface types like internal walls are determined automatically and can be assigned correct optical properties very easily.
- Measure planes/sensor grids can be created automatically based upon zones/rooms but are also extremely flexible and can have any shape or orientation. They do not even have to be in the room they are representing.
- Automatic post processing calculating both mean values and median values.
- It is possible to simulate geometry of almost any complexity combined with generated geometry from thermal models.
