English

The conception of complex buildings with innovative facade elements often demands dynamic building simulations. In some cases the required thermal parameters of the components must be obtained by experimental investigations. This paper describes this procedure exemplary for a photovoltaic facade, which allows the combined utilization of electrical and thermal energy. The parameters for a TRNSYS simulation could be obtained with the help of a PASSYS testcell. The results show that the total energy transmittance (gvalue) of such a facade strongly depends on the ambient air temperature.

The majority of design studies on naturally ventilated that wind power is expected to provide a significant or mechanically ventilated buildings do not take component of the motive force for the ventilation account of the close relationship between ventilation system. and thermal performance. That is it is common to assume that certain ventilation rates can be achieved and then used as input to a dynamic thermal model to assess temperatures within the building.

The simulated cooling plant equips an office building whose maximum cooling demand is about 5 MW. To meet this load, the cooling plant uses five cooling towers, four twin-screw chillers and four encapsulated ice storage tanks. The simulation of the cooling plant is carried out with the software TRNSYS.

The research we develop consists in evaluating "radiative comfort" during no heating periods in dwelling space and particularly in office buildings. The expression "radiative comfort" is used to characterize the thermal and visual component of the feeling of people set in indoor environments submitted to sky and sun irradiation by bay windows. Two numerical models, one for the visual aspect (Genelux) and the other for the thermal aspect (TRNSYS), have been connected together to carry out simulations on radiative comfort in office buildings.

The control strategy of the thermal storage HVAC system gives a large effect to the storage efficiency which dominates the tank volume to a great extent. Authors introduce how the temperature distribution of the tank varies and gives a considerable damage on the HVAC system performance, and how this kind of fault can be detected and diagnosed through the pattern recognition of temperature profiles which are obtained by storage system simulations.

A simplified heat transfer calculation method for underground buildings is developed. The method is based on the results from the ITPE method and is suitable for seasonal heat loss calculation. The simplified method consists of a set of equations for estimating the monthly total heat flow between an underground building and ground as a function of a wide range of variables such as building dimensions, insulation configurations, and soil thermal properties. The equations are designed to accept continuously variable input values.

The need for a decrease in the energy consumption of buildings implies an adequate understanding of control strategies. This requires an intensive use of simulation tools for the design and test of controllers of HVAC equipment. It is noticed that simulation software commonly used in control engineering do not provide any model of HVAC equipment. The SIMBAD project has been set up to develop a toolbox of such models adapted to the needs in the control field.

The  traditional  round  hut  has  been  analysed  by simulating the sensitivity of its different components in order to establish their relative performance. This has been done using SERIRES, a thermal simulation package suitable for warm climates. The hut is simulated in  the climate of Zambia which has a tropical upland climate. The results show that the mud and pole wall is the most influential element of the house. The opening sizes have been found to be quite dominant too, hence the small openings of the hut are quite suitable.

Within the framework of the validation methodology of our computer software CLIM2000, we asked 12 users to do the same validation exercise (prediction of energy consumption of a residential house) in order to evaluate the influence of the model user on the imulated results. The first part of this article describes the conditions in which this exercise was carried out.

We show here the actual state of a project based on n object-oriented philosophy, MotorLab. It is an interface to general and widely available interactive modeling environments (Matlab[2] and Ylab[3]1), and relies on the use of the description structure during the whole modeling process. Furthermore, we tried from the beginning to base the modeling process in MotorLab on a technological description without need, when possible, to ask the user for lower-level indications. The presented prototype is running, but many works remains to be done to reach the fixed objectives.