IBPSA2009

In this study we are investigating the urban environment, including complicated social dynamics, as the “urban system”. We have developed a simulator which can predict the environmental load for a city, comprised mainly of buildings, over the medium and long term. In this paper we describe the development of this simulator and verify its accuracy by comparing the calculated values with real data, investigating the population, housing, non-residential building, traffic and environment sectors, all elements of the simulator 

This paper proposes a set of principles for an international database of building materials that would meet Quality Criteria for use in building performance simulation. The proposal draws inspiration from the International Glazing Data Base, but suggests that this inspiration goes as far as the quality assurance goal, not the practice.

Building designers need design tools that enable them to rapidly explore the energy performance implication of early design decisions.  The tools should enable them to use their experience, along with performance feedback, to find near-optimal solutions, according to their criteria.  This paper presents a methodology for a solar house design, followed by a description of how it will be implemented in a design tool.

With the current focus on energy performance certification, factors such as increased and unstable fuel prices and consequent heating and electrical costs as well as the large number of buildings that are going to require energy analysis, a real need has surfaced for powerful, fast, and easy to use energy analysis solutions that will not be limited to energy experts.

Parametric analysis is a powerful method for exploring alternative design options and establishing variable dependency therefore design guide. The text-based user interface of EnergyPlus makes it a perfect simulation tool for automated (or scripted) parametric analysis. Since the number of simulations required for parametric analysis tend to be large, a software utility that may take advantage of the ever-increasing desktop computing power is desirable. “Parallelism”, in its broad sense of running more calculations simultaneously, comes naturally into our view.

We address the model-adaptive coupling between computational codes for indoor thermal comfort analysis considering different levels of detail in space and time. Starting with a whole-year simulation, sig-nificant periods are interactively identified in terms of a coarse thermal comfort analysis. After refining these critical intervals with respect to the spatial reso-lution, a multi-segment manikin model interfacing with the human thermoregulation model of Fiala (Int J Biometeorol, 45:143–159, 2001) is applied for studying transient and local effects of thermal sensa-tion.

This paper describes the methods developed to couple a commercial CFD program with a multi-segmented model of human thermal comfort and physiology. A CFD model is able to predict detailed temperatures and velocities of airflow around a human body, whilst a thermal comfort model is able to predict the response of a human to the environment surrounding it.

The UC Berkeley Comfort Model is a helpful simula-tion tool for the assessment of thermal comfort in non-uniform environments. A major element of the model is the implementation of a clothing node, which considers both heat and moisture capacitance of clothing. Heat capacity of the clothing has been demonstrated to be important when considering tran-sient effects. Moisture capacitance is important to correctly model evaporative heat loss from the body through clothing.

In this study, we developed a numerical thermal manikin (NTM) with inner-body thermoregulation functions to investigate the local and overall thermal comfort in non-uniform thermal environments. The effect of interaction between human body and his/her environment was modeled by transferring air condition data from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation into a thermoregulation model, feeding back the body surface temperatures from the inner-body model as boundary conditions to CFD, and then iterating until convergence.

The advent of environmentally driven building regulations, rising energy costs, and heightened client awareness of energy-related issues has increased the demand for the assessment of building integrated low-carbon (LZC) energy supply systems. However, it is seldom the case that any one software tool fulfils the needs for an appraisal of these types of systems. Therefore, there is a clear need for an effective methodology for the use of a range of software tools in LZC technology analysis.