The storage of surplus heat in the underground and retrieval when required is a promising method for optimizing the energy efficiency of new housing estates. A new approach for the coupled numerical modelling of such problems will be presented. Here, the energy simulation software TRNSYS is directly coupled with the finite element subsurface flow and transport simulation software FEFLOW. This w...

The impact of shade on the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) energy consumption in buildings is not automatically included in whole building energy simulations. Using transient system simulation (TRNSYS) software, models of the Union County Housing Authority’s energy efficient duplex enable the calculation of a monetary value for shading from trees, adjacent buildings, or shade ...

The Australian National University has a 400m Paraboloidal dish solar concentrator system, informally named “the Big Dish” that produces superheated steam via a receiver mounted monotube boiler. The system, (shown in Figure 1) which is the worlds largest was constructed in 1994. This paper describes the results of the latest experimental tests plus associated system performance modelling. The s...

Today, many building software tools for evaluating energy efficiency are available. More than three hundred are listed by the US Department of Energy. Despite the diversity of the tools and their users, they generally share the same goals: to reduce the consumption of energy and even to produce surplus energy. We were interested in comparing the information provided by five softwares programmes...

In the operating theatre, where exhausted air is not permitted to be re-circulated, maintaining the conditions could be tedious on the HVAC systems and found to be energy inefficient. This research will look into the potential energy savings using heat recovery devices in treating the ventilation air, without compromising the occupants’ thermal comfort and health in the conditioned space. For t...

Building energy analysis tools are available in many forms that provide the ability to address a broad spectrum of energy-related issues in various combinations. Often these tools operate in isolation from one another, making it difficult to evaluate the interactions between related phenomena and interacting systems, forcing oversimplified assumptions to be made about various phenomena that cou...

The paper discusses the modeling of a central solar heating plant with seasonal storage in the ground using the new object-oriented physical systems modeling language Modelica. Main emphasis is put on the hierarchical decomposition of the system model and on the re-engineering of an existing Fortran code for the ground store model. The object-oriented physical system model is compiled to a math...