This paper presents the evaluation of energy and exergy performance of several design alternatives of residential heating systems for a house. All component-based models, written and solved in the Engineering Equation Solver (EES) program, are assembled in several design alternatives for the heating, ventilation and domestic hot water (HEAT-DHW) systems. An energy-efficient house in Montreal is used as a case study.

This paper reports on research that uses building performance simulation and uncertainty analysis to assess the risks that projected climate change poses to the thermal performance of buildings, and to their critical functions. The work takes meteorological climate change predictions as a starting point, but also takes into account developments and uncertainties in technology, occupancy, intervention and renovation, and others.

Advanced control systems are widely applied in modern buildings so as to meet the requirements of energy conservation and higher level of indoor environmental quality. The building control strategies need to be assessed and verified before applying to buildings, by either experiments or simulation. Verification by simulation can saves time and labour. However, there is no single building performance simulation tool that offers sufficient capabilities and flexibilities to accommodate the ever increasing complexity and rapid innovations in control systems and technologies.

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.