The use of operable shading devices impacts building loads significantly. The need exists for an explicit treatment of window shading devices in the design of energy efficient buildings through simulation. A general framework for modeling complex fenestration systems has recently been implemented in ESP-r. The underlying models have been developed with emphasis on computational efficiency and s...

Building energy models of existing buildings are unreliable unless calibrated so they correlate well with actual energy usage. Calibrating models is costly because it is currently an “art” which requires significant manual effort by an experienced and skilled professional. An automated methodology could significantly decrease this cost and facilitate greater adoption of energy simulation capabi...

A methodology has been developed for the multiobjective optimization of the refurbishment of domestic building stock on a regional scale. The approach is based on the decomposition of the problem into two stages: first to find the energy-cost trade-off for individual houses, and then to apply it tomultiple houses. The approach has been applied to 759 dwellings using buildings data from a survey...

Accurate calculation of direct solar radiation with current methods is slow and frequently requires oversimplification of building geometry to obtain expedient performance simulations. This paper describes the use of a fast new method for calculating direct solar gains on architectural CAD models at any stage in design. A pre-processing module computes direct incident solar radiation with high ...

Hospitals, everywhere, are considered heavy energy consumers. Hospital Intensive Care Unit spaces pose a special challenge, where design guidelines requires the provision of external windows for daylighting and external view. Window protection strategies could be employed to reduce energy loads without detriment effect on comfort or health care. This paper addresses the effectiveness of using v...

Maximising the natural ventilation of a building can be beneficial in terms of comfort and reduced reliance on air conditioning. In noisy urban areas this can conflict with the need to reduce the ingress of external noise. In this study the effect of building exposure to noise on natural ventilation potential is investigated. The occurrence of window openings on a building façade was adjusted a...

Effective and efficient ventilation is essential when improving energy performance and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) of buildings. Reducing air permeability can considerably improve the energy performance of buildings; however, making the buildings more airtight may result in lower rates of natural ventilation which may in turn increase the risks of condensation and unacceptable IAQ. This study eval...

Due to the current environmental situation, energy saving has become the leading drive in modern research. Although the residential houses in tropical climate do not use air conditioning to maintain thermal comfort in order to avoid use of electricity. As the thermal comfort is maintained by adequate envelope composition and natural ventilation, this paper shows that it is possible to determine...

This paper proposes an intelligent Resilient Control Strategy (RCS) for Model based building control to improve the Building Automation System (BAS)’s performance against unanticipated adverse conditions or incidents such as model mismatch, weather disturbances, and component failures/ faults. The concept of resiliency of the BAS in terms of Quality of Control (QoC) is quantified and realized b...