Assessing the Effect of Microclimate on Building Energy Performance by Co-Simulation

Abstract

To provide a more accurate prediction of building energy consumption, it is necessary to take into account the influence of the microclimate around a building establishing through the interaction with other buildings or the natural environment. This paper presents a method for the quantitative assessment of building performance under any given urban context by linking the urban microclimate model ENVI-met to the building energy simulation (BES) program EnergyPlus. The full microclimatic factors such as solar radiation, thermal radiation, outdoor air temperature, humidity, and wind speed have been considered in the proposed scheme. The method outlined in this paper could be useful for urban and building optimal design.

Integrating Urban Heat Island Impact into Building Energy Assessment in a Hot-Arid City

“…Building energy simulations used a dynamic model to provide comprehensive descriptions of buildings and their systems [12]. Most BES models used today were developed for stand-alone buildings.…”

“…A promising solution to investigate the impact of local UHI on building energy use is to couple urban microclimate simulation tools with BES tools since there is no distinct tool that can directly assess the urban microclimate impact on building energy use [12]. Urban microclimate simulation tools predict local ambient conditions regarding different urban configurations.…”

A Review on Prediction Uncertainty in Exterior Heat Transfer Coefficient-Based Building Thermal Load: A Case of Microclimate

“…Another essential aspect responsible for increasing building energy consumption is climate change, which occurs naturally or by human interventions [6]. These changes are attributed to change in meteorological variables (such as solar radiation, longwave radiation, air temperature, air humidity, air wind speed and direction, and their interactions [7][8][9]) prevailing over a large area (spatial), usually spanning over several years (temporal). The built environment alters the local meteorological variables and creates its unique local microclimate, which is significantly different from surrounding neighbourhoods [10,11].…”

“…Besides radiation heat transfer (shortwave and longwave radiations), convective heat exchange between the building envelope and exterior environment is one of the major factors contributing to cooling load due to building envelope and thus responsible for substantial energy consumption [30]. The rate of convective heat transfer is proportional to is convective heat transfer coefficient (hc, CHTC), a contact surface area (A), and temperature difference between the exterior surface (To) and ambient air (Ta) [7,8], as shown by Eq. (1).…”

“…Several CHTCs are available in building energy simulation (BES) tools that do not account for microclimate effects because [7,8]: 1) they are expressed in terms of the wind speed from weather stations often situated at the nearby airport [35]; 2) they do not consider local flow field around the building. Ramponi et al [36] showed that the wind flow patterns are crucial while evaluating the amount of energy exchange between the building envelope and the surrounding air.…”