Hi Deepa,

I believe 'flip' means to switch which 'surface' on the individual pane the low-E coating is applied to. The order of the panes in the glazing setup will not change if you tick the flip box. When you are building up a glazing system, design builder clearly shows 'outermost pane' and 'innermost pane', these do not change if you check the flip box.

Basically I believe it is the opposite to what Chris just said.

In terms of finding out on which surface the coating originally is, and thus where it will move to if 'flipped', I have found using the software Window5 easiest for this. In Window5, find the same pane you wish to use in DesignBuilder and when you look at the glazing set up you can see a dashed line which indicates the location of the coating.

Hope that helps

Nick Kovess

Hi Deepa
I think flip means swap the place of inside and outside pane - not
flipping the individual panes so that the coating moves to the
opposite surface.
DB uses the International Glazing Database which you can download from
lbnl. It's easy to use so worth downloading a copy. Unforunately you
can't transfer the results to DB at present.

Chris

WINDOW has function to flip glass. It is a check box "flip" at the
glazing layer level. Same function is available in DesignBuilder.

DesignBuilder includes IGDB and the rule is the same as in WINDOW,
surface 1 is facing outdoor, while surface 2 is facing indoors. Same
rule applies to layers, first glass is outdoormost, last glass is
innermost. In DesignBuiolder you can look at the emissivities of each
glass layer and if emissivity is lower than 0.84 (usually low-e is is
less that about 0.2), then this is low-e surface. So if the glass that
you selected has low-e surface facing wrong side, then you can check
"flip" box and reverse it. As somebody pointed out, this reverses the
orientation of the glass, not the order of glass in the glazing system.
Typically, you want to have one low-e surface in each gap space (having
two low-e surfaces in the same gap space provides negligible
improvement) and typically you do not want low-e facing either indoor or
outdoor (some manufacturers have started using hard coat low-e facing
indoors in order to improve U-factor of the glazing system and whole
window, but this is still pretty rare due to issues of cleaning exposed
low-e surfaces, discoloring, etc. Also, it has negative consequences on
condensation resistance.) Thus if you have, for example double glazing
system with Pilkington Suncool Brilliant 30/17 (low-e glass) on the
outdoor side and Pilkington North America Optifloat Clear (Clear) on
the indoor side, you will notice that the low-e surface on the
Pilkington Suncool Brilliant 30/17 is surface #1, which would mean that
it faces outdoors. So you would check flip box, which will place low-e
coating on surface #2, which would be correct becasue it would be facing
the glazing gap.

Charlie Curcija

Deepa,

When you go to Openings in DB, and select glazing, then either edit
existing or create new ("+") glazing system, in the screen that opens,
on the left part of that screen there is section with Layers, and when
you click on Pane Type, on the right side of the screen, there is upper
portion and lower portion. Upper portion is selection area and there is
selection of glasses, including IGDB. They are grouped by types (clear,
coated, etc.). If you expand coated group and select one of coated
glazings, lower portion (right below the list) shows properties. If you
scroll down, you will see section on Infra-Red properties, where
emissivities 1 and 2 are listed. first one is outdoor faced and second
one is indoor faced, so as appropriate you can determine if it is right
orientation or not, and if not you just use flip box in the left portion
of the screen where you clicked on Pane Type.

Charlie