English

COMIS simulates multizone airflow and pollutant transport. It has been developed in an international context at LBNL and within IEA Annex 23. At the end of Annex 23, EMPA took over the coordination of further developments, and – together with CSTB – the maintenance of COMIS. In January 2001, the "COMIS v3.1 with IISiBat v2.4" package was released, and is available now from CSTB.

The paper describes the main features of the new simulation environment ColSim [15] and a special application for investigating ventilation strategies in buildings. ColSim was developed with the intention of simulating and testing complex control strategies in different HVAC and thermal solar systems, coupled to a building model. It is based on a modular structure and a modified Euler algorithm was chosen for the numerical integration of the nonlinear differential equations.

CODYBA is a software addressed to designers, teachers and research organisms. This software determines the energetic fluxes of a building zone. The basic data are the zones geometry and constitution. The main parameters are the climatic conditions, the internal loads and the heating and air conditioning powers, as well as their regulation mode.

In addition to the fact that the serviceability of building constructions used as exhibition halls has to be ensured, the climate stability of the whole structure has to be increased. Exemplary building physical calculations with transient boundary conditions (simulations) were set off by the aim to modernize the “ Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum” in Brunswick.

This paper deals with comparison between the CFD method and the zonal one, and also model experimental validation. The zonal method consists of a dwelling decomposition in several isothermal air zones, in contact with walls. 

This work comprises two parts :

This paper addresses the utility and the difficulties to predict the actual energy consumption of existing buildings, that can be useful to calculate true energy conservation potential taking into account the real usage of the building. True indoor temperature is of particular importance but also the availability of casual and solar gains. A sensitivity analysis on the set of behavioural parameters shows that the casual gains are highly dependent on the number of occupants at home and the lighting scenario, which requires to collect information about the occupants way of life.

We present an advanced formulation of zonal models for calculating indoor air temperature and flow distributions in buildings. Our modeling is based on  modularity:

This paper is focused on a mathematical model applied to both building thermal analysis and control systems design. A lumped approach is used to model the room air temperature and a multi-layer model for the building envelope. The capacitance model allows to study the transient analysis of room air temperature when it is submitted to sinusoidal variation of external air temperature, representing a case study for a cold day in the south Brazil. To evaluate the building performance with thermal parameters, we use MATLAB/SIMULINK.

This paper gives an overview about the use of building simulation in Switzerland. It focuses 4 different areas:

This article introduces building simulation in conjunction with a HVAC system, especially a split system, considering thermal and moisture behaviors of the perimeter walls. A description of such a HVAC system is taken from TASK 22/ HVAC BESTEST [4]. Its model had already been validated by analytical methods and verified by comparative tests [5]. In order to simulate the thermal and moisture behaviors of the walls a TYPE 158 [6] has been developed based on the finite element method. Its results are in very good agreement with the humidity response function [7].