To design energy efficient buildings using an optimal combination of passive design strategies it is necessary to understand the particular climate designed for. To use energy simulation software such as EnergyPlus TM , Ecotect TM or DesignBuilder TM to calculate building energy consumption or undertake a predictive thermal simulation of naturally ventilated buildings requires a detailed set of...

Model based control has been proven to have significant building energy saving potentials through operation optimization. Accurate and computationally efficient, and costeffective building energy model are essential for model based control. Existing studies in this area have mostly been focusing on reducing computation burden using simplified physics based modeling approach. However, creating a...

Effective energy management for large campus facilities is becoming increasingly complex as modern heating and cooling systems comprise of several hundred subsystems interconnected to each other. Building energy simulators like EnergyPlus are exceedingly good at modeling a single building equipped with a standalone HVAC equipment. However, the ability to simulate a large campus and to control t...

Methods to obtain accurate estimations of the savings generated by building energy efficiency interventions are a topic great importance, and considered be one keys increase capital investments in conservation strategies worldwide. In this study, novel data-driven methodology is proposed for measurement verification savings, with special focus on commercial buildings facilities. The presented a...

The energy consumption associated with domestic hot water supply services correspond to a significant portion of the total energy consumption of the urban water cycle. The objective of this study is to analyse the performance of domestic water heaters in the three largest cities of Australia (i.e. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane). The performance of systems was investigated undertaking a multi-p...

Parametric analysis is a powerful method for exploring alternative design options and establishing variable dependency therefore design guide. The text-based user interface of EnergyPlus makes it a perfect simulation tool for automated (or scripted) parametric analysis. Since the number of simulations required for parametric analysis tend to be large, a software utility that may take advantage ...

Building Energy Modeling (BEM) is an approach to model the energy usage in buildings for design and retrofit purposes. EnergyPlus is the flagship Department of Energy software that performs BEM for different types of buildings. The input to EnergyPlus can often extend in the order of a few thousand parameters which have to be calibrated manually by an expert for realistic energy modeling. This ...

In France, buildings account for a large part of the energy consumption and carbon emissions. Both are mainly due to Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems. So, the present work deals with the predictive control of multizone HVAC systems in nonresidential buildings. We used the PMV (Predicted Mean Vote) index as a thermal comfort indicator and developed low-order ANN-based mod...

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...

The main objective of this article is to present the calibration process of a computer model of a naturally-ventilated house built in southern Brazil. The house was monitored over two seven-day periods by using Hobo data loggers. The EnergyPlus computer program was used to create a computer model for the house; parameters related to air infiltration and natural ventilation were modeled by using...