In the last few years, to meet the need of build efficient homes in a short time and with maximum constructive simplification, lightweight prefabricated building systems have proved to be particularly suitable, especially in geographical areas which must deal with emergency situations (i.e., temporary housing). In this paper the winter and summer thermal performance of a building prototype, rea...

Due to the current environmental situation, energy saving has become the leading drive in modern research. Although the residential houses in tropical climate do not use air conditioning to maintain thermal comfort in order to avoid use of electricity. As the thermal comfort is maintained by adequate envelope composition and natural ventilation, this paper shows that it is possible to determine...

The paper describes research results concerning reliability analysis of building performances. Limit state approach based on FORM (First-Order Reliability Method) technique is described as an effective tool for reliability analysis in interior climate and building envelope design. The path of reliability analysis of building physics variables is presented with the help of the examples concernin...

This paper is focused on a mathematical model applied to both building thermal analysis and control systems design. A lumped approach is used to model the room air temperature and a multi-layer model for the building envelope. The capacitance model allows to study the transient analysis of room air temperature when it is submitted to sinusoidal variation of external air temperature, representin...

This paper describes the Building Controls Virtual Test Bed (BCVTB) that is currently under development at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. An earlier prototype linked EnergyPlus with controls hardware through embedded SPARK models and demonstrated its value in more cost-effective envelope design and improved controls sequences for the San Francisco Federal Building. The BCVTB presented h...

The energy performance of buildings depends on how effectively the building envelope responds to climate. Architects, therefore, need to design building envelopes with the consideration of local climate characteristics in the early design stage. Simplified formulas were used that evaluate the heating and cooling energy demand of building envelopes, which were applied to a model building with en...

A popular retrofit option is to install an exterior insulation finish system to the walls of existing buildings. This study evaluates the thermal and moisture performance of such a system with a vented wall assembly. In addition to being a case study, this field monitoring was intended to verify computation methods of building envelope performance. The long term monitoring was designed to be no...

One of the most important methods of saving energy and providing indoor comfort conditions of buildings is the careful design of the façades. A “double skin glass façade” is optimally one of the best options that control the heat interaction between indoor and outdoor spaces. Two kinds of heating energy is usually transmitted through exterior envelope “conduction” and “radiation”. Double skin g...