IBPSA2003

HVAC systems that supply both space heating and domestic hot water are becoming more popular in residential buildings In North America. With these “combination systems” water from a fuel-fired storage tank is used to satisfy domestic hot water needs directly. Space heating is accomplished convectively, by circulating hot water from the tank through a water-to-air heat exchanger in a fan-coil system. An explicit plant modelling approach was used to represent a combination system within the ESP- r/HOT3000 simulation program.

A computer-model is used to simulate the evacuation of the occupants in a building. The aim of the simulations is to establish an equal level of fire safety in accordance of the building regulations. Simulations can also be used to optimise the design of the escape routes (numbers of exits, dimensions of staircases).

The barriers to simulation deployment in design practice are well documented. They include: a steep learning curve, a lack of trained staff, hardware and software is- sues, lack of resources, the development of appropriate procedures for use in practice and communication and co-ordination issues. IBPSA Scotland is assisting its members to address these barriers by providing expert in-house support for the integration of the new simulation technologies into their existing work practices.

The  non-uniform  behavior  of  the  air  inside  a room, which is important in comfort analysis, can be evaluated by zonal models. While not as fine- grained as CFD simulation, they do give useful information about temperature and moisture distributions that is not available from lumped- parameter models. Therefore, we have developed a tool, called SimSPARK, to automatically build dynamic zonal simulations of a building zone.

The    performances  of  air  conditioning  equipments, like heat pumps, chillers or air conditioners, derive not only from the operative thermal levels, but also from the building requirement trend which normally involves frequent reductions of the full capacity. Nowadays an increasing consciousness of the importance of part load working influence on the equipment long  term efficiency has stimulated the investigation about part load  working  behaviour  of the machine.

The  software  Sim_Zonal  is  a  tool  for  evaluating indoor temperature and air flow distributions for residential and office buildings. The aim of this EDF (Electricity of France) software developed in collaboration with LEPTAB (University of La Rochelle) is to evaluate comfort problems and specifically risks of discomfort (risk of draught, indoor gradient temperature, etc..) with taking into account the coupling with the building envelope. The objective is to obtain a simple software for rapid appraisals, which is complementary to the CFD codes.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the indoor thermal radiation environment of the human body in detail. Using a 3-D human body model, shape factor calculations between a human body and surroundings are executed. First, the shape factor between the human body and each surface of the room is calculated. The human body is placed in the center of the room. The shape factor results are visualized by VRML. Generated VRML images indicate the influence of thermal radiation, which the human body receives from the room surfaces.

This paper presents "Scythe and Sew", a software environment for analyzing lighting simulation data. It provides a spreadsheet like infrastructure for manipulating high-dimensional simulation results. It allows users to both import and create lighting simulation data, or patterns, into a workspace for inspection. A composition area allows the user to perform algebraic operations on the patterns to obtain new insight into the data.

Two room air conditioners were modeled in order to predict the total cooling capacity, the sensible cooling capacity and the Energy Efficiency Ratio (E.E.R.) of each appliance. The mathematical correlations obtained were written in terms of room air wet bulb temperature and outdoor-side dry bulb temperature.

The validation and development of turbulence models are still important issues  related to Computa- tional Fluid Dynamics for ventilation purposes. The present work continues the work initiated by (Voigt, 2002). Four turbulence models are reviewed, the k-e model, the k-w model and two blending models combining the k-e and the k-w model. The reason for testing the blending models is that the k-e model is the most robust, while the k-w model gives a bet- ter prediction of the size of the recirculation zone occurring in the Annex 20 room, see (Voigt, 2002).