Dynamic thermal models: Reliability for domestic building design

Abstract

This paper describes a three year UK initiative—Applicability Study 1-to enhance the usability and credibility of detailed thermal simulation programs with particular reference. to the design of passive solar dwellings. Researchers at Leicester Polytechnic and the Building Research Establishment are working with ESP, HTB2 and SERIRES. The aims are to identify the problems for which these programs can be used reliably and those for which they cannot, to provide guidance on the best modelling techniques, indicate the uncertainty inherent in predictions, identify the attributes of programs which are necessary to obtain reliable results, and indicate areas in which additional theoretical or experimental research is needed. The results to date show that good agreement in some design trends can be obtained provided a high level of quality control is exercised and program users have a good understanding of the theoretical basis of the programs. There were, however, some situations in which the programs still predicted significant differences in the trends in energy consumption as the building design changed. These may be explained by the different algorithms employed by the detailed thermal simulation programs and errors in them.

Closing the performance gap through better building physics

“…5 Some of this collaborative research effort has been reported in this Journal. 6,7 Getting reliable results from simulation tools requires skilled users. Given the large quantity of parameter data that the user has to select in building a model, the process is somewhat error prone.…”

Methods of predicting urban domestic energy demand with reduced datasets: a review and a new GIS-based approach

“…Inter-model comparison work involving BREDEM and more detailed, dynamic thermal models, can be found elsewhere. 9,10…”