IBPSA2001

This  paper  describes  the  "Self-aware  Buildings" (SAB) project. This is an effort to advance the state of knowledge and technology in the area of environmentally conscious and user-sensitive integrated building control systems. An evolving test bed (SAB cell), its systems, and its information infrastructure are described. Spicifically, simulation- based approaches toward the integrated control of complex building and indoor environmental systems are explored. 

The aim of this work was to develop a simple model to predict the electric energy consumption of office buildings artificially air-conditioned, for  14 (fourteen) Brazilian cities (Belém, Brasília, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Fortaleza, Maceió, Natal, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Luís, São Paulo and Vitória). The building annual energy consumption was correlated  with  several architectural and constructive variables for each city analysed. Many variables were tested to seek those more important to be used to predict the electricity consumption.

In this study, the Typical Weather Year data for the simulations of buildings were developed following the previous study. Using these data, the annual heating and cooling loads of model houses in 69 Chinese cities were calculated. Regression equations were made to estimate the annual heating and cooling loads using the simulation results. The regional characteristics of the annual heating and cooling loads were clarified.

Heat stress associated with extreme temperatures and relative humidity has been shown to reduce the productivity  from  swine  facilities,  especially breeding facilities. Traditional cooling methods used in these settings include evaporative pad cooling or misting with water. These methods are unable  to lower relative humidity. Direct-expansion air- conditioning (DX-AC) has been shown to be effective, but generally not economically feasible at current energy costs.

The application of a passive cooling system to animal housing was evaluated. For this purpose a model was developed that allows to foresee the temperature and relative humidity of the air inside a livestock building where the natural ventilation is assisted through a solar chimney and the air is cooled through its circulation in buried pipes.

Windows  allow  daylight  to  enter a  space  but  they also allow for the transfer of heat gains and losses that affect the energy consumption of a building. This work optimises the relationship between window size, space dimensions and daylight to the energy consumption of the space. Models comprising of different room ratios and different room sizes were simulated using VisualDOE. The glazed areas of the rooms ranged from zero to 100% of the façade area. Energy consumption as a  function  of  window  area and room size was predicted for each model.

A methodology for the optimal operation of a HVAC system with a thermal storage water tank has been proposed by one of the authors1). In the present paper improvement of the methodology is explained together with simulation results obtained by using real building data. The main results are as follows. 1) This method is sufficiently robust to be applied to a real HVAC system having time varying air-conditioning (AC) load.

This  paper  describes  an  empirical  study  that  was conducted to determine whether and to what extent subjective evaluation of lighting in architectural spaces can be reproduced using computationally rendered images of such spaces. The results imply that  such  images  can  reliably  represent   certain aspects of the lighting conditions in real spaces.

This paper presents experimental data for the temperature stratification established within a full-scale enclosure, for the natural displacement ventilation flow driven by a source of buoyancy at floor level within the space with air as the working fluid. A range of predictive techniques is also investigated for the flow, and for each technique a critical comparison with the experimental data is presented. It is confirmed that the salt-bath modelling technique and related mathematical model of Linden et, al.