Radtest: the extension of program validation towards radiant heating and cooling

Radiant heating and cooling, including building component embedded systems, have become a common heating and/or cooling technology in the recent few years. Some currently available building simulation programs have the ability to model these systems. Some others do not, but users have developed their way of modeling by using the program’s limited possibilities. A systematic and complete validation with enough diagnostic power for this type of problem was missing to date. This was developed in the frame of IEA Task 22 'Building Energy Analysis Tools'. A set of validation cases was added to the BESTEST suite existing from earlier IEA projects. Five participants, using the programs CLIM2000, DOE-2, ESPr, IDA-ICE and TRNSYS, submitted their results in a multi step procedure. This helped develop the test procedure and at the same time delivered a base set of results to compare to. So a basis for the future validation of further programs in this area was formed.