English

The computational cost for the repeated evaluation of zonal-type building simulation models can be pro-hibitive especially in contexts, such as Building Opti-mization and Control Design, where repeated evalua-tion of the models — for different initial and bound-ary conditions — is required.

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is a well-documented phenomenon, in which the air-temperature in an urban area is elevated relative to the regional air-temperature.  This paper evaluates two recently developed methods for generating urban weather files from a rural station that account for microclimatic impacts on dry-bulb temperature and relative humidity.  The two methods examined are computationally inexpensive.  The first method is the urban weather generator (UWG) a model developed by Bueno et al.

Heat demand management through demand shifting will be crucial to enable load balancing in a future electricity grid with large domestic heating loads.  Using dynamic models, in IES-VE and TRNSYS, of a 2-bedroom dwelling with typical operational schedules, this research demonstrated that a mixture of active and passive Thermal Energy Storage (TES) within the existing building infrastructure could enable up to 4 hours of heat demand shifting, without significantly affecting the indoor thermal comfort.

This paper introduces a new software developed for building performance optimization. MOBO is a generic freeware able to handle single and multi-objective optimization problems with continuous and discrete variables and constraint functions. It can be coupled to many external (simulation) programs.  It has a library of different types of algorithms (evolutionary, deterministic, hybrid, exhaustive and random), and is able to handle multi-modal functions and have automatic constraint handling. The input is fed by a GUI.

Thermally activated building systems (TABS) provide high temperature cooling and low temperature heating which has a better efficiency compared to traditional heating and cooling solutions. Additionally the mod-erate required temperature levels for heating and cool-ing create the opportunity to use alternative (sustain-able) energy sources that would otherwise be insuffi-cient.

An urban microclimate model including air flow, heat and moisture transport in porous urban surfaces and solar and longwave radiation is presented, validated with wind tunnel experiments and used to study the effect of evaporative cooling on the thermal comfort in a street canyon. 

Poorly functioning and tuned control systems are a frequent source of building underperformance. Simulation can be an excellent method to study building controls, but a number of practical obstacles often interfere. The mapping of control functions—from a physical control system to a simulation model—is often error prone and contains gross simplifications. A major reason for this is that many simulation tools simply do not support modeling of realistic controls.

Techniques that improve solar reflectivity of urban surfaces to mitigate urban heat island phenomenon have become widespread with the use of highly- reflective paints (Kondo, 2008). Since these reflective paints have a higher proportion of diffuse reflection, there is an anxiety that if used on the sides of buildings, much of the reflected solar radiation is scattered toward the ground and surrounding buildings. This becomes even more of a problem when used in narrow street canyons.

Three versions (type 1, 2 and 3) of untypical climate data based on the Weather Year for Energy Calculations 2 (WYEC2) methodology were calculated. The following parameters were altered in comparison with standard WYEC2 year: the average value of a total daily amount of solar radiation; the average and maximum wind speed; the average, minimum and maximum dry bulb temperature; the average, minimum and maximum dew point temperature.