The lack of widespread use of building environmental design decision support tools in architecture appears to be because the tools are often too simplistic. Designers find it difficult to trust the output of a tool that apparently trivialises the design issues. Even, regular users of simulation have a difficult time developing procedures to ensure that they can trust the output of the simulation. A web site has been developed which addresses this need directly. This paper describes the design principles on which the web site is based.
The paper describes new improvements in SOLENE, a set of numerical models for the simulation of natural light in both the urban morphologies and the indoor architectural spaces which is developed in our laboratory. This tool takes into account the direct solar and the diffuse sky luminous energies for the evaluation of luminance, that can be computed on the real surfaces of the environment (ground, walls), or on a false working plane. The tool allows the computation of some classical parameters (daylight factor), but makes it possible to get other informative descriptors.
This work wants to provide the planners with a database of the typical mediterranean building structures. This provides a set of coefficients of the transfer functions which describe exactly the thermal behaviour of the structure, the time lag and the attenuation of the heat flux. For each structure is individualised the best number of coefficients and roots to assure the reliability of the thermal simulation.
The aim of this work is to present a computer application that was developed to be a user-friendly interface that simplifies the manipulation of weather data files. The computer code is capable of creating and editing .EPW (EnergyPlus) and .TMY2 (Typical Meteorological Year II) weather files and making some translation between the two formats. It is part of an academic project that comprises the development of a series of applications, which together will consist of a complete interface for illumination/Thermal Comfort simulations using the EnergyPlus engine.
Several attempts have been made these past few years to obtain a simplified dynamic model of thermal behaviour of buildings from recorded data. System identification techniques are well known in other fields, such as aeronautics.
The use of split-type air-conditioners in new apartment buildings becomes popular in Hong Kong. One requirement for their effective use is satisfactory heat rejection at the outdoor condensing units. When a group of outdoor units is working together, the heat released by one condenser may affect the heat rejection rates at the others, and hence may deteriorate their performance.
This paper presents a mathematical model yielding a simplified representation of the thermal behaviors of ivy-covered walls. The model is integrated with a CFD program to implement simulation. Experimental results have been used to form the boundary conditions of numerical simulations. A series of parametric sensitivity analyses have been carried out for identifying the key factors that affect ivy- coverings’ potential for reduction on cooling load of the buildings. These analyses indicate that ivy- coverings can considerably reduce the heat flux through the external walls that its cover.
When some faults take place in a thermal storage HVAC system, changing pattern of the temperature profiles of the thermal storage tank is useful to infer where some faults exist. Authors designed some parameters calculated from the temperature profiles of the thermal storage tank in HVAC system and their Fourier Transform to detect the difference between the normal and faulty state. Further, present paper shows practicality of two methods of parameter optimization, a differentiation rate increment method and a variable selection method, with an actual application to a hospital.
In order to make proper radiative meshes with considering thermal distribution on solid surfaces, we inves- tigated the adaptive mesh generation method and per- formed parametric survey for a threshold which con- trols subdivision of mesh. With these studies we found that the adaptive mesh generation increase the accu- racy of predicting mesh surface temperature and air temperature even if the adaptive subdivision is rather soft one.
Air-conditioning systems with floor thermal storage can be used for cutting peak load and utilizing nighttime electric power. For the effective use of this system, however, thermal energy must be stored during the night in a way that does not waste energy. In this paper, an optimal heat input to such a system is investigated under prescribed external climatic conditions by making use of the optimal control theory.
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