Monte Carlo simulation

In Austria the lack of guidelines or standards has caused many discussions and disputes on the question if “sufficient ventilation” can be ensured with window airing only, in particular in newly constructed, airtight residential buildings. This work presents the development of a calculation method aiming to provide a simple-to use tool to estimate the risk of mould growth and the window airing interval required to ensure good indoor air quality assuming a range of different boundary conditions and occupant behaviours.

A number of differences between the experimental results and the calculated thermal behaviour results of the timber frame walls have been obtained during the investigation carried out at summer operation conditions. The aim of the recent investigation is to determine at what stage in the calculation procedure the most significant errors in the estimation of the values of physical parameters might be made. The impact of errors on the further calculation reliability will be discussed as well.

In order to quantify uncertainty in thermal building simulation stochastic modelling is applied on a building model. An application of stochastic differential equations is presented in Part I comprising a general heat balance for an arbitrary number of loads and zones in a building to determine the thermal behaviour under random conditions. Randomness in the input as well as the model coefficients is considered. Two different approaches are presented namely equations for first and second order time varying statistical moments and Monte Carlo Simulation.