English

This paper investigates the inclusion of passive airflow components such as solar chimney, and wind induced earth air tunnel into a coupled multi-zone ventilation and thermal model. Existing commercial coupled multi-zone ventilation and thermal modelling software do not include passive airflow components, which need a simultaneous prediction of temperature and airflow rate in the components. The present model is compared with the coupled COMIS-TRNSYS software for lightweight buildings with large openings and both the thermal and airflow prediction match with good accuracy.

In this paper, the application potential of ground-coupled heat pumps (GCHP) in a multi-storey office building in Hong Kong was investigated.  It was found that within the limited land area occupied by the building, the GCHP could only handle the cooling load for one floor over a range of the ground thermal conductivities and undisturbed ground temperatures.  The year-round energy consumption of the GCHP was compared with those using the conventional vapour-compression chiller systems.

New façades of high-rise buildings often include renewable energy converters to allow “green building” operation. At the same time, numerous tenants value visual transparency. Transparent solar thermal collectors (TSTC) aim at decreasing the non-renewable primary energy (NRPE) demand and increasing the visual transparency at the same time. On the one hand, this paper presents the main modelling challenges that arise when considering building façades and especially integrated TSTC systems. New TRNSYS Types have been especially developed for this purpose.

The Sustainable Buildings Research Centre (SBRC) currently under development at the University of Wollongong will be an exemplar in respect of demonstration of a range of technical and operational means of reducing greenhouse emissions and other ecological impacts. This paper details the constraints and opportunities presented to the project in terms of renewable energy production and minimization of building energy consumption. The building performance was simulated using variety of tools for a range of ventilation and air conditioning options.

A calculation model for air-to-water heat pump for  space heating in residential house was developed.  This model is assumed to be used for labelling or  energy standards in Japan and parameters used in the  model are assumed to be identified in the facility test  by the manufactures. In order to simplify the test and  decrease the identified parameters, the model used  heat pump cycle model where the efficiency could be  calculated by the evaporation temperature and the  condensation temperature.

In this paper, we developed a new method to forecast 10-minutes ahead wind speed based on Heteroscdastic Gaus-sian Process and investigated the impacts of this predict-ing on a mix-mode operated building. The forecasting re-sult shows the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 9.2%. The indoor air temperature, infiltration air change rate and cooling energy consumption varied 25% in av-erage compared with the baseline model where the wind speed is not from forecasting.

There has been an increasing demand for sports facilities in urban areas recently. As a result of this, more attention is drawn towards not only the energy performance of these building typologies, but also creating a healthy indoor environment for the users. This Study investigates the thermal and ventilation performance of a sports hall within an aquatic centre using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. IES Virtual Environment software was used to perform the simulations.

In this paper, a methodology for interfacing and as-sessing a Model Predictive Control strategy in a build-ing simulation tool (SIMBAD) is presented. Firstly, a system identification is performed in order to derive a suitable embedded model for the predictive controller from the simulation tool. Secondly, we assess the per-formance of this control strategy by introducing un-certainties on forecasted weather conditions and oc-cupancy. Finally, we provide some simulation results in order to analyse the robustness of the controller in presence of uncertainties on forecast.

The faulty operation of Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems in commercial buildings can waste vast amounts of energy, cause unnecessary CO2 emissions and decrease occupant thermal comfort, reducing productivity.   We propose a new method of automating Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD), based on the modelling of operational faults in HVAC subsystems, using techniques from statistical machine learning and information theory.

This paper presents an analysis of whole-building performance modelling and simulation process of a low-energy single-family detached residence located in Northeast U.S. A total of six design alternatives are modelled with EnergyPlus to predict relative performance improvements associated with a diverse set of energy efficiency measures of both building envelope assemblies and unconventional HVAC systems with inclusion of on-site renewable energy technologies.