A comparative analysis using multiple thermal analysis tools

Recent work has been undertaken to determine the most effective passive cooling strategies to be adopted in the refurbishment of large numbers of traditional adobe dwellings in Riyadh City, Saudi Arabia. To do this, thermal simulation was used to first determine the sensitivity of each building to different design parameters and then assess the potential effectiveness of a range of different passive cooling strategies. In virtually all aspects of simulation no single algorithm or methodology is perfectly suited to every modelling condition. All have their applications, but some will usually be more appropriate than others under certain circumstances. Given the ramifications of this work in terms of cost, a high level of confidence in the analysis results was very important. Thus, simulations were carried out using multiple thermal analysis tools and their results compared. This paper outlines the issues associated with creating a base computer model that is fully compatible with multiple tools. It also presents the results of a series of comparative parametric sensitivity studies carried out between the tools and concludes with a summary of the results.