English

In this paper, the authors present the Georgia Tech Uncertainty and Risk Analysis Workbench (GURA-W), a software toolkit that explicitly captures uncertainty about the physical properties of the building and the energy models used to predict its performance. The workbench provides a UQ Repository, giving energy modellers direct access to previously quantified uncertainty distributions for a variety of parameters and models. The workbench also provides automatic identification and modification of parameter values in the input file for the simulation.

Being increasingly insulated, new buildings are more and more sensitive to variations of solar and internal gains. Controlling mechanical or natural ventilation often constitutes an efficient solution to maintain indoor comfort during hot periods. The proposed energy management is a predictive set of optimal commands issued from a dynamic programming optimization knowing in advance the weather, occupancy and internal gains for the next 14 days. This method is tested on a bioclimatic house situated in Chambery, France with an annual heating demand of 26 kWh/m².

Building energy model reduction exchanges accuracy for improved simulation speed by reducing the number of dynamical equations. Parallel computing aims to im-prove simulation times without loss of accuracy but is poorly utilized by contemporary simulators and is inher-ently limited by inter-processor communication. This pa-per bridges these disparate techniques to implement ef-ficient parallel building thermal simulation. We begin with a survey of three structured reduction approaches that compares their performance to a leading unstructured method.

There is an unexploited opportunity to employ either fully naturally ventilated, or partially, when mixed with mechanical ventilation in buildings in Mediterranean climate. The possibility of exploiting natural ventilation due to complexity of physical phenomena that is non-linearity, chaotic behaviour of air movement, demands a major tool  “Computational Fluid Dynamics” (CFD)1 for design analyses. Fluent was used to study the airflow and temperature distribution in the occupied spaces evaluating different possibility of exploiting natural ventilation for different outside conditions.

A 2D axisymmetric ODE model that couples heat transfer and groundwater flow in and around a stand-ing column well system was developed by the means of a thermal resistance and capacity network. In this work, the real transient behaviour of the groundwa-ter velocity field and well drawdown is considered by applying the spatial and temporal superposition of the so-called Theis equation, resulting from the time vary-ing bleed flow. The temperature field is obtained by integrating an ODE system.

Increasing daylight into indoor swimming pools creates a warm and sunny environment for swimmers and provides connections with the outdoor environment.  However, lifeguards report that veiling reflection from the water surface, a result of this daylighting, limits visibility into pool basins.  Thus, the veiling reflection caused by increased daylight affects the safety of swimmers. A study was conducted to develop a Design Guidelines, intended for the Hong Kong government and local professional practitioners, to reduce the occurrence of veiling reflection on water surfaces.

The urban complex with multi-function and multi-form has become an important architectural mode in the modern urban development process. By combining the building features of urban complex and the types of its air conditioning system, an urban complex thermal climate prediction model was developed and applied in a southern planning project as an actual subject to simulate and analyze the outdoor thermal climate in urban complex.