This paper reports a study of a unique system that integrates many renewable energy resources to achieve zero CO2 emission for building services for the head office of a company specialised in renewable energies. A dynamic thermal model was developed to simulate the summer cooling using both design criteria and recorded data. The monitored data acquired by the Building Management System (BMS) were also analysed with the predicted results to assess thermal performance of the system.

As well known, Hourly weather data should be available before running building energy consumption simulation.A large number of Chinese locations have only six-hourly or daily measured weather data, because observed data are not easily obtained or not digitalized. Measured hourly, sixhourly and daily weather data for four cities in China, namely Xi’an, Kunming, Hangzhou and Shantou were gathered and analyzed. Three climatic variables, namely dry-bulb temperature, relative humidity and atmospheric pressure, were investigated.

A universal lumped model is developed with the aim to predict the thermal performance of Double Skin facade. Three modules – ventilation, heat transfer and penetration - are coupled to comprehensively describe the energy and mass transfer processes. The unknown parameters, resistance coefficient and heat convection coefficient, are discussed and estimated. The influences of cavity shading position, cavity depth and ventilation height on energy performances are analyzed at the end of the paper based on the simulation results.

Simulation techniques have been playing a more and more important role in research and development of reliable and energy efficient building automatic control solutions. Furthermore, simulation is appraised as being viable to judge building automation and control solutions. Therefore, to test and evaluate control strategies, Siemens Building Technologies (SBT) developed a building and HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) plant model library.

Weather data in formats required for annual energy simulations are not available at all locations where building designs are being evaluated. Synthetically generated weather data for these sites could be a viable option. This paper reports on the differences in weather and energy prediction results when using synthetically generated data vs. the use of recorded weather data for 50 cities worldwide.

and simulation-based reproduction of performance data from traditional buildings is presented. This approach involves long-term data collection regarding local climate, indoor conditions in the selected building objects, construction methods, building materials, energy systems, ventilation regimes, and occupancy patterns. Subsequently, the collected data is analyzed and interpreted in view of the buildings’ salient design features. Furthermore, a digital performance simulation model of the building is generated and calibrated based on collected indoor climate data.

This study examined the effect of building envelope on thermal comfort. The effects of key energy conservation measures, such as window/wall ratio, transmittance of fenestration glass and shading devices, were studied. The output from EnergyPlus was use to predict their influence on thermal comfort. Standard energy conserving measures proposed by ENVLOAD to reduce indoor thermal discomfort and cooling energy consumption were examined.

In reaction to the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), existing and newly lanced standard developments by CEN (European Committee for Standardization) were harmonized and synchronized, resulting in a set of about 50 standards addressing different aspects of the EPBD and the implementation of an overall building energy performance calculation method. A few of them address simulation issues: An overview of these is given, focusing on one standard covering system related aspects for buildings with cooling, humidification or dehumidification.

Double-skin facade (DSF) is an additional glass skin on the outside wall of the building. In this study a mechanically ventilated and equipped with solar protections (venetian blinds) facade was studied. The airflow inside the facade as well as opening/closing degree of the blinds was controlled in order to increase annual energy performance for both heating and cooling. Numerical simulations for climatic data of Lyon (France) showed good performance of studied DSF compared to a traditional façade.

In an attempt to reduce the high computational efforts for dynamic thermal simulations using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) the authors have recently developed an adaptive freeze-flow method (i.e. freezing of flow equations over variable time periods). This paper documents the work that has been carried out to predict the radiative surface heat transfer in dynamic thermal building processes using CFD. The Monte Carlo and Discrete Transfer radiation models were investigated and results compared with analytical solutions.