Comparison of multizone air flow measurements and simulations of the LESO building including sensitivity analysis.

The LESO building is a three storey, medium-sized office building on the campus of the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne. In this building component leakages have been carefully determined followed by extensive measurements of the boundary conditions as well as the air flows. This paper first gives some basic concepts of the evaluation and the sensitivity analysis. Then, the measured data are compared with results from simulations performed with the COMIS multizone air flow program. The simulations include a sensitivity analysis which shows the influence of input errors on the calculated air flows. Leakage distribution, outdoor temperature, wind and wind pressure coefficient data are considered in this analysis. The comparison shows good agreement for some cases. For other cases, the respective error bars of measured and calculated flows do not overlap and the agreement is poor. The crucial part in such a comparison exercise is the modelling of the building. Especially for real buildings it is mostly very difficult to model the wind pressure accurately enough to be able to perform a conclusive comparison. Future work aims at the development of flexible sensitivity analysis tools, which would be included in the simulation package and would be adaptable in a problem-oriented way to the actual case.