English

This paper presents the results of an empirical study to establish if and to which extent professionals in design community are familiar with and use building performance simulation applications. A total of 198 architects in Austria participated in this study, answering questions regarding their familiarity and experiences with performance simulations tools, problems they have encountered, and their suggestions toward improvements of such applications.

In order to reduce the environmental load (energy and materials) of buildings, a study was undertaken to develop and assess solutions for a dynamic, weather and daytime adaptable office façade. The following steps have been taken:

Conventional building control systems usually apply central control schemes that do not fully address individual occupancy differences in built environmental requirements. Recent application of personal control modules in commercial buildings presents a bi-lateral control scheme, in which a building operator and an occupant can both control the occupant’s local environmental settings, e.g., lighting, heating, cooling, and ventilation, etc. While personal controls may enhance individual comfort, they may also neutralize operators’ cost-saving efforts.

For many buildings, continuous operation of the air conditioning system is not necessary for achieving thermal comfort during the occupied periods. Depending on the building's thermal and operational characteristics the air conditioning system may be operated during a specific period of time that may partially or completely cover the occupancy period. In this case, a considerable amount of energy can be saved without compromising comfort conditions provided that the correct operation strategy is implemented.

The paper presents the advanced use of S-Functions, facilitated by the Matlab/SimuLink environment. An existing indoor climate model is implemented in an S-Function, consisting of a continuous part with a variable time step and a discrete part with a fixed time step. The heating systems, including a heat pump, an energy roof and thermal energy storage (TES) are modeled as continuous systems using SFunctions. All presented models are validated. The advantages of S-Functions are evaluated and it demonstrates the powerful and flexible use of MatLab/SimuLink.

Validation is the key when attempting to instill confidence in a building simulation tool. The user expects that the underlying algorithms are correct, and will have more confidence in the simulation results generated using a program that has undergone validation testing. The IEA BESTEST (Judkoff and Neymark 1995) was developed by the International Energy Agency Solar Heating and Cooling (IEA/SHC) Task 12 and the Energy Conservation in Buildings and Community Systems Annex 21 as a test procedure for building simulation program developers.

This paper describes novel high-performance visualization techniques for reviewing time dependent data common to building simulation. These techniques enable rapid inspection of trends and singularities, in the data that are difficult to ascertain  from conventional methods. In the case of daylight simulation, understanding when and where daylight is available in a proposed design can lead to significant energy savings in the resulting electric lighting systems of buildings. These new visualization techniques are introduced through three case studies.

This paper deals with the development and the testing of a simulation algorithm for the temperature behaviour and the flow characteristics of double façades. It has been developed in order to obtain a tool which enables the energy consultant to make quick design decisions without being required to use fairly complicated CFD tools. In order to determine the degree of accuracy of the algorithm, a double façade has been monitored under controlled conditions and the results have been compared against the predicted values for several design situations.

This paper refers to the existence of the variety modes and 'Chaos' in building natural ventilation or smoke venting, systems, and provides the some computational instances by means of the network model.

Despite  discussions  of  the  universal  workstation, there is increasing workplace dynamics in organizations. These dynamics include space configuration changes, changes in occupant density, and increasing equipment density. Building infrastructures have not evolved to meet these demands, with little flexibility in air conditioning and ventilation, lighting, electrical, and telecommunication systems in new or existing office buildings. Simulation tools can be used to evaluate dynamic workplace scenarios and provide guidance for designers by modeling indoor environmental conditions.