IBPSA2001

In civil engineering there is an increasing demand for calculation methods to assess the moisture behaviour of building components. Current tasks, such as preserving historical buildings or restoring and insulating existing buildings are closely related to the moisture conditions in a building structure. In this context, questions regarding moisture behaviour and the related transport processes occurring under natural climatic conditions as well as the risks thus involved always occur. These questions can either be answered with the help of experiments or by numerical simulations.

This    paper    summarizes    the    recently concluded PhD study by the first author. The study addressed uncertainties in building performance evaluations and their potential impact on design decisions. Design evolution involves a chain of design decisions. Each decision is supported by input supplied by the various domain experts to the design team at large. The research has focused on the domain expertise of the building physics expert, responsible for those inputs that sustain rational decisions with respect to energy use, thermal comfort, HVAC  system sizing  etc.

Just in time for the 25th anniversary a new version of the international well-known simulation tool TRNSYS is released: TRNSYS 15. New developments of both user-friendly interfaces and mathematical models have been implemented responding to a growing commercial application of TRNSYS. For example, the graphical input interface IISiBat has been completely rewritten in C++ and offers now all the comfortable features of modern window programs.

Computer models used to predict building heating and cooling energy and occupant thermal comfort at present rely on climate data collected at a remote meteorological station. No account is taken of the changes in meteorological conditions caused by the urban developments, yet it is known the differences can be important.

In a larger research program on ‘cost versus value evaluations in the early design stages of technical buildings’, a study and software implementation has been made to simulate HVAC expertise using an Integrated Early Design Environment. Basically the idea is to create a virtual early design software environment where the development of the requirements, concept designs and evaluations on costs and values is supported.

This  paper  discusses  the  use  of  multiple  building performance simulation tools to support the design of a state-of-the-art intelligent library building in Singapore.

The simultaneous optimization of building’s fabric construction, the size of heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) system, and the HVAC system supervisory control strategy, would auto- matically account for the thermal coupling between these building design elements. This paper describes the formulation of such an optimization problem for a single air conditioned zone.

Building   Integrated   Photovoltaic   (BIPV)   system implementation is on the rise worldwide. A computer modeling tool was developed to predict BIPV system power generation in commercial buildings. This tool utilizes hourly weather data files and  complex Electric Utility tariff structures to predict BIPV system power output as well as providing economic analysis. A number of cities and building  facade angles were modeled to test the predictive nature of this tool.

For users and developers of energy simulation software tools, knowledge of which inputs have a signif- icant impact on the simulation results is very impor- tant, as this will dictate which areas of the building justify additional development and input time. In the form of a sensitivity study, those factors gen- erally considered to have the largest impact on simu- lated heating load, were compared against a  base case model—a typical Canadian house in Ottawa. It was determined that the simulated heat load was particularly sensitive to the following  parameters: the sub-zoning of the living

This   paper   reports   on   a   research   project   that investigates the need for computational support for a specific stage of the building design process: the selection of energy saving components. The approach consists of a survey amongst architects and consultants who were involved in the design of recent energy-efficient building projects. The results reveal that computational tools only play a limited role in the selection of energy saving components, mainly due to the design decision process currently in use.