The Mapping of Simulated Climate-Dependent Building Innovations

Performances of building energy innovations are most of the time dependent on the external climate conditions. This means a high performance of a specific innovation in a certain part of Europe, does not imply the same performances in other regions. The mapping of simulated building performances at the EU scale could prevent the waste of potential good ideas by identifying the best region for a specific innovation. This paper presents a methodology for obtaining maps of performances of building innovations that are virtually spread over whole Europe. It is concluded that these maps are useful for finding regions at the EU where innovations have the highest expected performances. Figure 2. Twenty-five-year mean modeled wind at 10 m height over the entire domain REMO 10 km resolution (Larsen 2010) Maps like figure 2 are suited for wind energy assessment application in Northern Europe. Moreover, literature of the related work shows that a lot of EU maps of external climate parameters are available. 1.2 Goal and Outline The maps presented in the previous Section are all based on external climate parameters. However, the goal of this work is to produce maps of indoor climate related building performances. The outline of the paper is as follows: Section 2 presents the methodology for obtaining maps of performances of similar buildings that are virtual spread over whole Europe. It provides a benchmark of the EU mapping of the Bestest building. The produced maps are useful for analyzing regional climate influence on building performance indicators such as energy use and indoor climate. Section 3 presents a methodology to produce maps of systems innovations using statespace models based on a commercial case study. In Section 4, the conclusions and future research are provided. 2 CREATING MAPS OF BUILDING INNOVATIONS USING HAMBASE The methodology used for obtaining the required simulation results and maps can be divided into three steps. These are presented in the following Sections. 2.1 External climate files Over 130 external hourly-based climate files were produced using commercially available software (Meteonorm 2011) using the so-called wac format. Figure 3 presents the distribution of the locations over Europe. Figure 3. The distributions of the locations of the external climates in Europe. Each climate file includes hourly based values for the common used external climate parameters: Horizontal global solar radiation [W/m] (ISGH), Diffuse solar radiation [W/m] (ISD), Cloud cover [0-1] (CI), Air temperature [C] (TA), Relative humidity [%] (HREL), Wind speed [m/s] (WS), Wind direction [0-360] (WD), Rain intensity [mm/h] (RN), Long wave radiation [W/m] (ILAH). 2.2 Whole building simulation model The whole building model originates from the thermal indoor climate model ELAN which was already published in 1987 (de Wit et al. 1988). Separately a model for simulating the indoor air humidity (AHUM) was developed. In 1992 the two models were combined and programmed in the MatLab environment. Since that time, the model has constantly been improved using newest techniques provided by recent MatLab versions. The current hourly-based model HAMBase, is part of the Heat, Air and Moisture Laboratory (HAMLab 2013), and is capable of simulating the indoor temperature, the indoor air humidity and energy use for heating and cooling of a multi-zone building. The physics of this model is extensively described by de Wit (2006). The main modeling considerations are summarized below. The HAMBase model uses an integrated sphere approach. It reduces the radiant temperatures to only one node. This has the advantage that complicated geometries can easily be modeled. Figure 4 shows the thermal network. Where Ta is the air temperature and Tx is a combination of air and radiant temperature. Tx is needed to calculate transmission heat losses with a combined surface coefficient. hr and hcv are the surface weighted mean surface heat transfer coefficients for convection and radiation. Φr and Φcv are respectively the radiant and convective part of the total heat input consisting of heating or cooling, casual gains and solar gains.