English

Detailed experimental studies of heat and moisture transfers in building envelope parts are important to gain knowledge about hygrothermal responses and to validate models. For this purpose, a 20 m2 wooden-frame test house built in Grenoble, France, was widely instrumented to collect temperature and relative humidity at different depths in the wall, as well as indoor and outdoor conditions. Besides, a general simulation tool was selected to simulate coupled transfer at the building scale. In this paper, an experimental sequence is presented and simulated.

Choosing the optimal combination of building compo-nents that minimize investment and operational costs is a topic of great importance in the building simulation com-munity. Optimization using simulation tools, i.e., Energy-Plus, becomes computationally expensive for traditional search approaches. An additional challenge is the com-plexity of the input parameter space, which is usually very large and contains both continuous and discrete variables. In this paper, we present a novel approach to address both of these problems.

Developing a methodology of simulating tree shading on daylight performance in indoor spaces such as lux levels on a task plane is investigated. The findings will be useful in improving design of lighting environments in public buildings such as office buildings or classrooms. The method used a camera that takes hemispherical images, positioned in the centre of the task plane. Boundary conditions need to be defined at the outset include the type and age of the trees, the type of the sky and turbidity, the orientation of the window, the time of the day, and the time of the year.