English

There are two almost orthogonal aspects that need to be considered when looking at the use of design tools by the profession, the integration of the design tools "around" the product being designed and the integration of the tools "into" the process using them. In the building design field, the "Product" aspect of this has received much more attention than the "process" aspects. However, in the business arena, Process Support is the latest "hot topic" and is spawning lots of new systems.

Most currently available hourly energy analysis programs utilize separate and sequential simulations of the building, air handling systems, and primary energy plants. This results in a lack of feedback from the system to the building and from the pIant to the system and building. This is especially a problem when an undersized system or plant is simulated. If an undersized system were actually installed in a building the zone cooling and or heating loads could not be met all the time causing the temperatures to float out of the desired range.

Electric and hydronic baseboard heating systems rely on natural-convection-driven air motion to distribute energy throughout a space to maintain thermal comfort. For electric baseboard heating systems employing an on/off control scherne, the room air motion and consequent room temperature distributions are time-dependent. The thermostat cycling rate and location play a significant role in determining the air temperature swings, changes in room air velocity, and possibly in the mixing of ventilation air to dilute indoor air pollutants.

IDA is a flexible, object-oriented, environment for simulation of buildings and their subsystems. The key features of the system are summarized. Available IDA literature is listed. 

This paper discusses development of a library of equation-based models for building HVAC system simulation. The main source of the models is the ASHRAE Secondary Systems Toolkit (Brandemuehl 1993), augmented with primary system models from other sources in order to provide a library sufficient to model conunon HVAC systems.

Examples on application of system simulation in preplanning, sizing and comissioning of HVAC systems are briefly given and typical obstacles for a more broader utilization in engineering offices are introduced. Efforts needed to overcome most of the obstades are described. It is shown that currently system simulation is a business for experts. To increase the application of simulation in HVAC engineering offices efforts should be made in training and supporting these experts. 

This study was carried out on a real site gymnasium situated in the center of France. The building is equipped with two remarkable energy saving systems; running together: a ventilated roof and an air-earth exchanger. 

A methodology is presented for creating models which are suitable for use in fault detection and diagnosis schernes in applications where it is impossible to obtain data from the actual plant. Generic qualitative models based on fuzzy rules are used to describe the basic features of the behaviour of a class of plants of similar design. The generic models are identified off-line from training data produced by computer simulation of typical plant designs.

The Research and Development Division at Gaz de France assesses; and improves building heating and cooling equipment by both experimental and modelling/simulation approaches. In this context, the R&D Division uses two tools to model the thermal dynamic behaviour of buildings: the ALLANTM. Simulation modeller connected to the NEPTUNIX solver, and the CSTBat software.  

In computer simulation, accurate modelling of air conditioning equipment is important in the studies of dynamic plant performance, for instance in the selection process of a plant control scherne, in the investigation of plant energy consumptions, or in the detailed design of a plant equiprnent.