Creating typology is a comparative method to investigate the physical or other characteristics of the built environment. It can be a useful instrument to facilitate the thermal performance assessment of existing buildings. Heat material’s resistance and construction techniques play a significant role in energy performance of buildings. It is influenced by many factors, such as ambient weather conditions, building structure, and heating, ventilation and airconditioning systems.
The study was focused on analyzing five types of residential buildings at the center of the Sulaimani city (north of Iraq) to assess the energy performance of the building types and comparing results with dynamic analyses, using IDA ICE 4.7.1 software. The results revealed that the thermal performance of the buildings is mostly influenced by the variations in the construction techniques and materials.
Accurate building physics performance analysis requires time-consuming, detailed modeling, and calculation time requirement. This paper evaluates the impact of model simplifications on thermal and visual comfort as well as energy performance. In the framework of dynamic zonal thermal simulation, a case study of a residential building in hot climate is investigated. A detailed model is created and simplified through four scenarios, by incrementally reducing the number of thermal zones from modeling every space as a separate zone to modeling the building as a single zone. The differences of total energy and comfort performance in the detailed and simplified models are analyzed to evaluate the grade of the simplifications’ accuracy. The results indicate that all simplification scenarios present a marginal average deviation in total energy demand and thermal comfort by less than 20%. Combining rooms with similar thermal features into a zone presents the optimal scenario, while the worst scenario is the single-zone model. Results showed that thermal zone merging as a simulation simplification method has its limitations as well, whereas a too intensive simplification can lead to undesired error rates. The method is well applicable in further early-stage design and development tasks, specifically in large-scale projects.
Natural driven ventilation is a widely used technique in hot and arid climate, but it is rarely known that it can lead to significant energy saving in a moderate climate too. In this paper, an existing building is presented that was designed with a passive air conduction system (PACS), where wind and buoyancy effects induce air to be exchanged without external energy needs. The aim is to show that the design methodology, using numerical simulation to give accurate results, is able to use them in further developments. Due to this design process, the specific building possesses numerous special properties, including airflow accelerating elements, solar-heated “chimneys”, and the indoor heat sources coming from the industrial technology. As the building has been constructed and was equipped with around 750 sensors (integrated and manual), it is possible to analyze the ongoing physical phenomenon in a highly detailed way and to collect the experienced dataset for further investigations. The current study carries out a complex validation of the design and the used numerical methods to give general design rules for further PACS design and support following investigations, e.g., occupant comfort prediction or latent heat storage calculation. The experiences showed that the developed computational fluid dynamics technique gives a below 99% accuracy in the velocity and the temperature field, and approximately 85% accuracy in the volume flow values, resulting in a good prediction for aerodynamic characterization of buildings, i.e., passive ventilation air exchange rate.
Due to negative environmental impacts caused by the building industry, sustainable buildings have recently become one of the most investigated fields in research. As the design technique itself is mainly responsible for building performance, building energy design optimization is of particular interest. Several studies concentrate on systems, operation, and control optimization, complemented by passive strategies, specifically related to the envelope. In building physics, different architectural considerations, in particular, the building’s shape, are essential variables, as they greatly influence the performance of a building. Most scientific work that takes into consideration building geometry explores spaces without any energy optimization or calculates optimization processes of a few basic variables of simplified space geometries. Review studies mainly discuss the historic development of optimization algorithms, building domains, and the algorithm-system and software framework performance with coupling issues. By providing a systemized clustering of different levels of shape integration intensities, space creation principals, and algorithms, this review explores the current status of sustainability related shape optimization. The review proves that geometry design variable modifications and, specifically, shape generation techniques offer promising optimization potential; however, the findings also indicate that building shape optimization is still in its infancy.
This paper has the main focus in energy consumption by the residential sector in city of Prishtina. Considering the fact that the energy production in Kosovo is not sufficient in relation with the everyday demand and at the same time the growth of the energy demand based on different resources is evident, a detailed analysis and identification of the energy performance of this sector is inevitable. One of the main components that cause the energy demand in residential sector is the heating energy demand. The energy resource and heating systems used by the residential sector in city of Prishtina are diverse. This paper elaborates and identifies the number of residential buildings, number of dwellings, building typologies, heating energy resources, heating systems used by the dwellings and the energy demand for heating energy, by using quantitative methodology. Based on the results achieved by the research, future detailed analysis is possible to identify other components, which affect the heating energy demand by the residential sector. These first results can be used as a basis of the first district scaled energy modeling of the city of Pristhina. By applying the energy management method, developed by Prof. Gerhard Hausladen and his research group at the TU München, a first modeling step will be absolved. After analysis of the current state of the investigated districts, future concepts will be made increasing efficiency and sustainability.
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