Airbase publication

Residential buildings are characterized by being envelope-load dominated buildings, hence are greatly influenced by the outside climatic conditions. Due to the harsh climate of Saudi Arabia, residential buildings on average, consume  more than half of the total consumed energy. The bulk of this energy is consumed by the airconditioning system which is required to remove substantial amount of gained heat due to poor thermal envelope performance. Implementing proper envelope thermal characteristics for residential buildings can significantly reduce energy consumption.

Fires in buildings account for 60% of fires in Taiwan. Since establishment of the National Fire Agency in  1995, many fire codes have been promulgated resulting in a gradual decline in the number of casualties of fire. However, for old apartments in urban areas, although regulations aimed at improving fire-prevention refuge facilities and fire-fighting equipment of existing building have been announced, they cannot be implemented efficiently due to the lack of public acceptance. This investigation has found that hundreds of thousands people live in such buildings.

This paper presents a set of solutions to enable  differential time scales for dynamic boundary conditions within whole-building energy simulation, specifically occupant behavioral adaptations in response to short-term changes in solar and daylighting conditions. The concept is to allow specialized libraries to determine in tandem the state of critical variables, such as window blinds and lighting systems, at higher frequencies than the building domain time step (e.g.

The following paper is focused on hygrothermal behaviour of roofs with ventilated air layers subjected to air leakages in their internal decks (the internal partial construction located below the ventilated air layer). Possibilities of CFD modelling of such constructions are discussed in the first part of the paper including the problem of introduction of water vapour diffusion into calculation. A brief comparison of results from CFD analysis and from calculation based on a technical standard is also included.

The use of a thermal probe allows a range of in-situ conditions to be taken into account that impact upon the properties of building materials (λ, α) as encountered in reality. In this study, the transient thermal simulation of a model representing a line source in an infinite material sample has been used to guide the development of an experimental thermal probe apparatus. Simulation produced a series of datasets that have been used to test the data analysis routines used with the experimental probe.

The simulation of building efficiency and cost is a crucial driver to contemporary building design today. This paper presents the development of a software tool to simulate the lifecycle costs of building construction and maintenance. It is a part of the nD modelling tool development and also based on the overall system architecture of the nD modelling tool. nD modelling aims to integrate a number of design dimensions into a holistic model, which would enable users to portray and visually project the building design over its complete lifecycle.

Dynamic facility state models could effectively support simulation-based building systems control. In a simulation-based control strategy, the permutation space of control options (alternative states of control devices) at a future time step is proactively explored using computational simulation. The simulated implications of alternative control options are then compared based on users' preferences. From this comparison, the preferable control actions can be deduced.

In this paper several kinds of window shading are introduced and compared. In addition, the potential of energy efficiency of exterior shading and three representative windows in three typical cities of China are analyzed and compared using eQUEST software. The objective of this paper is to analyze the influence of window shading in different climate zones of China through simulation. The result shows that in freezing climate zone it is appropriate to use the low-e windows with small U-value.

Failures can lead to a series of problems in the complex heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings. Fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) is an important technology to solve these problems. Models can represent the behaviors of the HVAC systems, and FDD can be realized with models. Using the model as intermediary, a link between system simulation and FDD can be built. Simulation has provided a convenient platform of operation for FDD, the overall simulation methodology in FDD of HVAC systems is briefly introduced.

It is difficult to model those complicated objects around buildings, which will obviously affect the flow patterns and temperatures of the outdoor environment. In this paper new method is concluded to solve this kind of modeling problems. Those centralized objects are treated as porous media which will also affect the air flow and turbulence. New source terms are coded into the model to simulate the characteristics. In this way, we can easily model as many as influential factors into the simulation and save much computational time and get a satisfactory result.