The winter operation of ground-source  heat pumps is expected to lead to drift phenomena in the zones surrounding the vertical ground heat exchangers. A moving aquifer tends to oppose the thermal drift, due to the advection groundwater phenomena. A modelling study of the quantitative influence of the groundwater flow on the thermal drift is performed, based on the moving infinite line source model. The analytical solution of this model is numerically solved and implemented in a computer software.

It is a known fact that fault in the buildings can cause as much as 30% increase in energy consumption. Thus, identifying critical failure modes affecting building energy performance is important. It can lead to actions to eliminate them, but it could as well play a role in designing a suitable monitoring and diagnostic system. Typically, expert judgment is used to guess critical faults, which leads to over instrumented, complex, and expensive building performance monitoring and diagnostic systems.

Simulation is often utilised in the regulatory assessment of building performance as in the case of the Australia’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS). A recent government discussion paper (SOG-EE, 2012) proposes increased use of simulation as a method for building compliance assessment; however, responses to this document demonstrate a lack of confidence in the accuracy of the approved thermal assessment software used in the Scheme. Through empirical and intermodal comparisons, this paper examines the capacity of the computational engine.

As an important influence factor of unban climate, unban water bodies take positive effect on the micro-climate of surrounding area in summer. This paper firstly evaluated performances of five different models comparing with experimental results of windtunnel to find out which is most suitable for thermal prediction of micro-climate. Then, SKE model was selected to simulate four planning cases considering solar radiation and humidity transportation to predict wind and thermal-humidity environment.

This study is focused on the impact of shading control and thermostat set point control on daylighting metrics, glare evaluation and energy consumption for perimeter office spaces (zones around perimeter). State-of-the-art and new control strategies for roller shades are summarized and their effect is analyzed for spaces with thermal mass in two different climates.

This paper describes the concept of an intelligent zone controller for the efficient operation of environmental systems in buildings. This controller deploys a predictive control methodology with embedded simulation capability. To address the scalability issue in realization of predictive simulation-assisted control systems, we explore the possibility to divide the target building into a number of well-formed sub-domains. Thus, control logic and the associated simulation routines can be distributed and enacted both autonomously and asynchronously.

Traditional energy performance calculated using building simulation with the typical meteorological year (TMY) weather data represents the energy performance in a typical year but not necessarily the average or typical energy performance of a building in long term. Furthermore, the simulated results do not provide the range of variations due to the change of weather, which is important in building energy management and risk assessment of energy efficiency investment.

Many European countries assess the heating and cooling needs of buildings using the quasi-steady state calculation method described in EN ISO 13790. The energy need is calculated by establishing the monthly balance of heat losses and heat gains, and the dynamic effects are taken into consideration by introducing correlation factors. The difficulty of evaluating night-time ventilation with such a method comes from the strong influence of the dynamic effects.

A building life cycle simulation tool has been developed and linked to thermal simulation, allowing energy use and other environmental impacts to be evaluated. Existing building LCA tools are based upon a static method, considering yearly average processes and impacts. A dynamic method has been developed here in order to model the time variation of electricity production and allocate environmental impacts to different uses. Results on a case study show an increase of environmental impacts up to 40% compared to the common static method.