IBPSA2001

A key barrier to the acceptance of simulation within building design has been identified as the fact that it is not fully integrated into the design process. The project described in this paper attempts to address this barrier by embedding modelling as a standard component of design practice procedures within an architectural practice. Important elements of the research that are described in the paper are:

To  meet  the  requirements  of  building  owners  and users in environmental issues, life cycle assessment (LCA) has become an important method to monitor the ecological perspective during design and decision making processes. Existing LCA tools are separately available, but are missing the important links to other design tools, such as architectural, technical system design and energy simulation softwares. This paper presents a new integrated tool BSLCA for ecological design and analysis of building services.

Energy demand of different glazing materials and light control systems for office spaces are analyzed in this paper. The approach is based on an improvement of the hourly simulation program IENUS (Integrated ENergy Use Simulation), that was developed to assess building energy demand taking into account the integration between visual and thermal aspects. IENUS implements thermal aspects by the transfer function method, while daylighting is pre-processed by the package Superlite before entering in IENUS.

This paper presents the development of a zone model adapted to the study of the influence of the sensor position in building thermal control. The temperature measured by the sensor of a room temperature controller depends on its position in the zone. The measured sensor temperature depends of the convective coupling of the zone and its emitter and can differ from the “mean air temperature”.

In  this  paper,  the  impact  of  a  veranda  (attached sunspace) on energy consumption is analyzed by numerical simulations (Clim2000 software) for two different configurations : a (existing) residential individual house and a (new) apartment building.

We have developed software applications that design HVAC systems (that is, select, locate, and size components and their interconnections)  given building descriptions, user preferences, and built-in rules.

The HVAC BESTEST has been developed within the framework of the IEA (International Energy Agency) It is a comparative test method developed for estimating the ability of whole building simulation programs to model the performance of unitary space cooling equipment.

The potential offered by computer simulation is often not realized: Due to the interaction of system vari- ables, simulation users rarely know how to choose input parameter settings that lead to optimal perfor- mance of a given system. Thus, a program called GenOpt® that automatically determines optimal pa- rameter settings has been developed. GenOpt is a generic optimization program. It min- imizes an objective function with respect  to multi- ple parameters. The objective function is evaluated by a simulation program that is iteratively called by GenOpt.

A  structured,  generalized  modeling  and  simulation software is described that enables development and analysis of control algorithms and systems and pre- diction of thermal performance and energy use in buildings. The  basis for this tool is the  state-space technique, which casts differential and algebraic equations describing the system into a vector-matrix form. An automated building modeling capability generates detailed and simplified models directly from building plans by using a library of construction element models (walls, floors, etc.).

To provide practitioners with the means to tackle problems related to poor indoor environments, building simulation and computational fluid dynamics can usefully be integrated within a sin- gle computational framework. This paper describes the outcomes from a research project sponsored by the European Com- mission, which furthered the CFD modelling aspects of the ESP-r system. The paper sum- marises the form of the CFD model and describes the method used to integrate the thermal and flow domains.