English

Natural ventilation generally implies a complete or partial opening of windows which modifies the solar gains and the natural lighting, changing the solar and daylight factors. This “secondary” effect is generally neglected in building energy simulation. This study analyzes the impact on the modification of optical characteristics of glazed surfaces on thermal condition and natural lighting due to opening windows.

The need to identify variables, which influence human behaviour, has become one of the priorities in the quest to reduce energy demand. Environmental and personal variables, as set out in the thermal comfort models, have long been associated with people’s behaviour by predicting their state of thermal comfort or rather discomfort. The aim of this paper is to explore and to report on the influences of these variables on thermal discomfort indices used in building simulation models.

Several measurements were performed on an innovative perforated solar wall. It is made of metal cladding with perforations, installed at several tens of centimeters from a building wall, thus creating a cavity, heated by the solar radiation from the sun. Ventilation fans create negative pressure in the cavity, drawing in the solar heated air through the perforated panel. The results found in literature were compared with experimental results. A good agreement was found.

This paper describes yearly and monthly optimization of greenhouse shells. Simulations adopt a validated building energy simulation program, adapted and re-validated for simulation of commercial greenhouses, including a tomato crop model. The work focuses on multi-objective optimization of thermal and optical greenhouse shell properties using a genetic algorithm. Analysis of optimization results is supported by sensitivity analyses.

This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of Model based Predictive Control (MPC) performance, with the final goal to rank the building and system parameters influencing the robustness of the MPC.

The aim of this paper is to develop an opti-mization algorithm to control the temperature in the occupation zone, using reduced-order ap-proaches based on POD. Two methods are em-ployed here: an adjoint-equations method and a based response surface method. These are tested on the cases of a lid-driven cavity heated by the left and a 3D ventilated cavity, similar to a room.

This paper explores a technique for generating marginal abatement cost curves for individual build-ings. It makes use of sequential optimisation and exhaustive search of building refurbishment options based on a custom building energy model developed previously by the authors.