Towards an integrated decision tool for evaluation of energy performance during building and plant design

This work presents the creation of a dynamic energy model able to simulate, with a reasonable workload, a very large number of integrated building-plant systems with different scales and resolutions, in order to have a design support for architects and designers, reducing their modeling effort and errors. The model includes the dynamic simulation of the building envelope, all the heating plant subsystems, and all the plant components relating to the production of domestic hot water, the latter with possible solar thermal integration. Starting from a detailed model created with the calculation engine Trnsys, the paper explores simplifications that can considerably reduce the number of necessary inputs for the simulations, thus minimizing the modeling, implementation and simulation runtime of the model, while still maintaining an acceptable degree of accuracy with respect to the computational results and real energy consumptions. The model is benchmarked by means of a case study comprising three different residential apartments with very high thermal performances, subjected to a complete monitoring of all energy consumption. The results show that the accuracy of the integrated model is within 16% of the real monitored consumptions, even for extreme cases such as the one presented.