Building retrofitting is an efficient means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Its first focus on building façade, as transmission and air leakage are the main sources energy loss in buildings. Nowadays, modellers cannot easily implement envelope assume constant values, which results erroneous estimates. Additionally, simulations, a weather file usually inserted with measurements provided by...

To investigate the impact of the new UK Climate Projections on building performance, a primary school building has been simulated with help of a dynamic building performance simulation package (EnergyPlus Version 6) using 4 sets of future test reference year data which were produced by the UK Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, Exeter University, Manchester University and Nort...

In the Swiss research project OptiControl (www.opticontrol.ethz.ch), new predictive building control strategies are developed and applied to a fully occupied, well instrumented demonstrator building. Here we report on the development and validation of the EnergyPlus building energy performance simulation model used in the project. Validation was done in three stages: (i) plausibility testing, (...

This paper presents an analysis of the energy performance of commercial buildings in Brazil based on the influence of the thermal transmittance of the external walls and roof. Several combinations were simulated taking into account different input data such as the internal load density, window to wall ratio, solar absorptance and other parameters to evaluate their influence on the annual energy...

The energy consumption associated with domestic hot water supply services correspond to a significant portion of the total energy consumption of the urban water cycle. The objective of this study is to analyse the performance of domestic water heaters in the three largest cities of Australia (i.e. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane). The performance of systems was investigated undertaking a multi-p...

Blind systems have been introduced to provide visual and thermal comfort, as well as to reduce energy use in buildings. A wide variety of such systems exist in terms of thermal and optical properties, location (exterior, interior), and physical configuration (size, distance between the blind slats). The current problem with blinds is that their operation is not based on the dynamics of the room...

In this study, a dynamic model was developed to simulate the housing stock in the North East region of England. This model takes input from the English Housing Survey database and uses EnergyPlus as its simulation engine. A range of retrofit options was applied to the housing stock, to examine the possible CO2 reductions corresponding to different scenarios. By embedding a multi-objective optim...

This paper examines several existing methods of static shading device design, and presents a new approach called SHADERADE. The approach is implemented as an eponymous tool based on Rhinoceros® and EnergyPlus, and offers flexible, novel techniques for assessing the thermal desirability of solar transmittance through any potential shading volume or surface. Using simulated sidelit offices locate...