English

Over the past decade many models have been developped to analyse thermal behaviour of buildings, but thermal comfort of occupants, which should never be forgotten, is seldom treated. The aim of this paper is to present three models created to get a complete tool to simulate thermal behaviour of a man in a real environment. The simplest one is the "PMV-PPD", which calculates comfort indices.

In recent years, there has been much discussion about the need for improvement in the quality of building design software. One area of design software improvement which has received much attention is that of information integration. Such integration is recognised as both desirable in its own right and necessary for advances in other areas of building design research. Advanced functions such as project management, intelligent design interfaces and complex building thermal performance simulation all depend to some extent on the free interchange of information.

The present means of building representation, fall short in establishing a common modelling base for the various application specific analysis and simulation programs, describing building behavior and performance. A "generic", object-oriented, approach to product modelling allows multiple design representations to be described as different views of a common, gradually evolving, building product model. The productmodel provides the capability to generate, in successive design iterations, a coherent description of the form, structure and dimensions of the building.

The aim of our paper is to present a multi-discipline CAD system named CONCEPTOR which allows the user to work during the various stages of the building engineering design. Most of the actions are dedicated to the building performances assessment for various technical domains with an extension of tools towards: economical estimating, quality analysis, checking of the solutions according to the regulations, the standards and the constraints established by the designer, coherence of the various works and solutions.

A simplified procedure is described, to model daylighting, cooling, and heating impacts of vertical glazing in commercial buildings. Both annual and peak impacts are calculated, as well as cooling-equipment -sizing impacts. Simple economic analyses (present worth and simple payback) are included. The name BEEM is used, for Building Energy Estimation Module. The public domain procedure is implemented in spread-sheet software, available at nominal charge for materials and handling.

In this paper, we want to show an application of fuzzy control to building thermal regulation. Thanks to a new learning method, inspired from connexionnist techniques, the controller learns to identify the rules it must use, either without any previous knowledge, or with approximative rules. This method is tested in simulation on a thermal regulation problem and is compared to a discrete time PI controller.

This paper describes the techniques used within the ESP environment# to simulate coupled heat and mass flows in integrated building and plant systems. In particular, it describes the equation-sets used to represent inter-zonal (building) and inter-component (plant) fluid flow, the method used for the simultaneous solution of these non-linear equations, and the solution coupling of the heat and mass conservation equation-sets. By means of a brief description of a case study, the application in a real building performance evaluation context is demonstrated.

Analytical solutions for coupled diffusion of heat and moisture through a material are used to develop a generalisation of the wellknown 2 x 2 matrix method for describing heat flow only. A new 4 x 4 matrix is derived which relates temperatures, humidities, heat flows and moisture flows at one surface of a slab with those at the other. Multilayer slabs and surface boundary conditions, including moisture-impermeable surfaces, are easily handled by multiplication of matrices.

A first order correction to uni-directional heat transfer is proposed, so that multi-dimensional heat transfer effects can be accounted for with only a moderate increase in storage and CPU timerequirements. The model has been implemented into the ESP building energy simulation program and is shown to be able to predict the order of magnitude of changes due to corner effects and therml bridges.These effects are shown to be non-negligible even in full scale buildings, especially if one isinterested in an accurate prediction of internal surface temperatures.

While advanced models for combined heat and moisture transfer have been available in the community of building scientists within the last two decades, such models have not yet become an item in the toolbox of consultants, building designers or manufacturers of building components. Moisture dimensioning among the practitioners still takes place by rules of thumb or at best by use of the steady state Glaser method or modifications thereof.