Role of Simulation in Performance Assessment of Building Components

Other papers in this conference discuss the experimental requirements for high quality outdoor testing of building components and the subsequent analysis procedures for identifying key parameters that quantify performance. This is important for achieving standardised metrics that characterise the building component of interest, whether it is a passive solar component such as a ventilated window, or an active component such as a hybrid photovoltaic module. However, such testing and analysis does not determine how the building component will perform when placed in a real building in a particular location and climate. For this, it is necessary to model the whole building with and without the particular building component. For this reason a procedure has been developed and applied within several major European projects that consists of calibrating a simulation model with high quality data from the outdoor tests, and then applying scaling and replication to one or more buildings and locations to determine performance in practice of the building component of interest. This paper sets out the methodology that has been developed and applied in these European projects. A case study is included demonstrating its application to the performance evaluation of hybrid photovoltaic modules. The paper also discusses how high quality experimental data from outdoor test cells can be used to help in empirical validation of simulation programs, and discusses the benefits and disadvantages compared to whole building monitoring.