English

The majority of the natural lighting, in urban slums and rural areas arround the world, is blocked off and virtually no light reaches the building spaces in lower floors as well as the streets and urban spaces. Painting the buildings' surfaces may increase the availability of daylight below. Some surfaces may be easier to paint and will require less cost or effort to paint than others. This paper formulates a combinatorial optimization problem to address this situation and uses different approaches to solve the problem.

This paper describes the use of building performance simulation into a wider implementation of an energy management system (EnMS) based on ISO 50001 requirements. The CASCADE project, funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) call ”ICT for Energy Efficient Buildings” aims to test different modelling strategies supporting Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD). Some of the main challenges includes the integration of new and legacy IT systems, the adoption of a robust calibration methodology, and the systematic verification of energy savings.

Starting from an entry in the recent German Energy Plus Renovation competition (EPA --- EnergyPlus im Altbau 2012), the paper presents the design tools used to assess the project's energy consumption at competition stage.

Thermal bridging is a problem that arises from using a thermosyphon. It is used as a passive part of the building envelope in south facing walls. A solution is proposed and investigated in this paper. SolidWorks 2011 is used to simulate the thermal performance of the thermosyphon. A finite element analysis, FEA, (4 points Jacobian) is employed to measure the temperature and heat flux at different surfaces of the thermosyphon. Simulation results showed that the backward maximum heat flux reduces 76 times when a Teflon piece is introduced.

This paper presents a simple all-weather sky radiance model (diffuse component). The model development was motivated by the intention to find a balance between the model's simplicity and ease of use on the one side and predictive capability on the other side. To develop the model, measured data collected at the microclimatic monitoring station of our institute (the Department of Building Physics and Building Ecology of the Vienna University of Technology) was deployed. To formulate the model, a formalism based on the concept of irradiance coefficient was used.