English

This paper presents the requirements of the building representation to supports the holistic performance assessment of building performance into a single application. The performance views considered are energy consumption, room acoustics, occupant comfort, and the life cycle impact assessment related to the fuel and materials flows over the whole building life (LCIA). The paper continues with the description of this data model into ESP-r, an existing advanced building simulation application, and its extension to support room acoustics and LCIA views.

This paper argues that analytical approaches (i.e., simulation) and inductive learning methods (i.e., neural networks) can cooperate to facilitate a daylight responsive lighting control strategy.

New calculation procedures for calculating conduction heat transfer for foundations are described. These procedures are first validated and then implemented within EnergyPlus source code (beta version 5.0). Selected results of the implementation are presented for a 3-zone low -rise building. The results indicated that the developed foundation heat transfer module accounts better than existing EnergyPlus module for the ground mass and its effects on reducing the hourly and seasonal fluctuations of slab surface temperatures.

The lack of widespread use of building environmental design decision support tools in architecture appears to be because the tools are often too simplistic. Designers find it difficult to trust the output of a tool that apparently trivialises the design issues. Even, regular users of simulation have a difficult time developing procedures to ensure that they can trust the output of the simulation. A web site has been developed which addresses this need directly. This paper describes the design principles on which the web site is based.

The paper describes new improvements in SOLENE, a set of numerical models for the simulation of natural light in both the urban morphologies and the indoor architectural spaces which is developed in our laboratory. This tool takes into account the direct solar and the diffuse sky luminous energies for the evaluation of luminance, that can be computed on the real surfaces of the environment (ground, walls), or on a false working plane. The tool allows the computation of some classical parameters (daylight factor), but makes it possible to get other informative descriptors.

This work wants to provide the planners with a database of the typical mediterranean building structures. This provides a set of coefficients of the transfer functions which describe exactly the thermal behaviour of the structure, the time lag and the attenuation of the heat flux. For each structure is individualised the best number of coefficients and roots to assure the reliability of the thermal simulation.

The aim of this work is to present a computer application that was developed to be a user-friendly interface that simplifies the manipulation of weather data files. The computer code is capable of creating and editing .EPW (EnergyPlus) and .TMY2 (Typical Meteorological Year II) weather files and making some translation between the two formats. It is part of an academic project that comprises the development of a series of applications, which together will consist of a complete interface for illumination/Thermal Comfort simulations using the EnergyPlus engine.

Several attempts have been made these past few years to obtain a simplified dynamic model of thermal behaviour of buildings from recorded data. System identification techniques are well known in other fields, such as aeronautics.

The  use  of  split-type  air-conditioners  in  new apartment buildings becomes popular in Hong Kong. One requirement for their effective use is satisfactory heat rejection at the outdoor condensing units.  When a group of outdoor units is working together, the heat released by one condenser may affect the heat rejection rates at the others, and hence may deteriorate their performance.

This paper presents a mathematical model yielding a simplified representation of the thermal behaviors of ivy-covered walls. The model is integrated with a CFD program to implement simulation. Experimental results have been used to form the boundary conditions of numerical simulations. A series of parametric sensitivity analyses have been carried out for identifying the key factors that affect  ivy- coverings’ potential for reduction on cooling load of the buildings. These analyses indicate that ivy- coverings can considerably reduce the heat flux through the external walls that its cover.