Whole building simulation may play a key role in the optimization and assessment of the market potential of new building components. In the SOLVENT Project, ESP-r was used for such purposes, in the case applied to a new reversible ventilated window. The innovative character of the window required the development of a specific simulation approach within ESP-r, in order to account for buoyancy in the air channel. A multi-zone approach with an air flow network was developed, and several variations studied.

To provide additional validation data for the multizone airflow and contaminant model, CONTAMW, experiments were performed in an occupied 3-story townhouse in Reston, VA. A tracer gas, sulfur hexaflouride (SF6), was manually injected within one room of the house and the concentration of SF6 was measured in each zone. This same process was then recreated in CONTAMW and the resulting predictions were statistically compared to the measured values. A total of 10 experiments were conducted and simulated between May 2000 and June 2001.

The set points of supervisory control strategy are optimized with respect to energy use and thermal comfort for existing HVAC systems. The set point values of zone temperatures, supply duct static pressure, and supply air temperature are the problem variables, while energy use and thermal comfort are the objective functions. The HVAC system model includes all the individual component models developed and validated against the monitored data of an existing VAV system.

The practical use of building simulation software requires a global and comprehensible interpretation of results for decision support in design. We propose a method in which the temperature of the free-running building is used to express: 1) the ratio between energy consumption for heating and cooling, 2) energy saved when ventilation is used instead of mechanical cooling, and 3) the degree of building adaptation to the environment.

In the standard design process of a building, total building simulation using building simulation software is encouraged to be incorporated into the design process as early as possible. However, this paper demonstrates that building simulation can be used as late in the process as the early construction phase of a building project, though usually with increasing cost of building modifications.

In tropical humid climate, thermal environment can be controlled using natural ventilation. But this technic raises the problem of acoustic comfort. Some technical devices coping with aeraulic and acoustic comfort constraints exist but they are not suitable in all economic context. Thus the urban research is exploring built configurations performances for future urban planning. This article presents an exploratory simulation method of these physical parameters, and analyses results of two guadeloupean urban fabric tests.

People that work in office buildings have new needs in terms of comfort within their work place. We suggest to develop a multicriteria office cell façade, allowing to control luminous, thermal and airflow parameters. It will be controlled to offer global

The aim of the European SSHORT (Sustainable Social Housing Refurbishment Technologies) project is to increase and promote rational and efficient use of energy in the retrofitting of social housing buildings. In this scope, one step was to evaluate with simulation studies the technical and economical interest of selected sustainable technologies on standard collective social housings in participating countries.

Modelling of buildings with natural or hybrid ventilation systems requires the coupling of a thermal and an air flow model because of the strong mutual impact of the thermal and the air flow behaviour. The newly developed tool TRNFlow is the complete integration of the multizone air flow and pollutant transport model COMIS [Dorer 2001] into the thermal multizone building module of the building and system simulation program TRNSYS [Klein 2000]. An internal solver algorithm using

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