[Bldg-sim] Existing building thermal performance assessment methodology?

[Jeff Haberl]

Richard,



The most current publication that covers all aspects of how to rate a building's performance would be the ASHRAE Performance Metric Protocols or PMP. The PMP has three levels of evaluating the energy, water, IEQ (thermal comfort and IAQ), acoustics and lighting performance. In the PMP special emphasis was given to references for both North American and European Standards where the reader could go to learn more.



Unfortunately, assessing the thermal performance of a real building is a bit more difficult because of the compounding errors that occur when one tries to unravel the performance of the various heat transfer pathways, (i.e., the windows, walls, roof, occupants, infiltration, internal loads, etc. Furthermore, to make matters worse, the smaller  the building (i.e., residential), the worse it is to decompose the thermal components, i.e., the window SHGC from the U-value, or the infiltration.



There have been some worthy attempts that have shown certain things can be coaxed out of the data. The earliest one that I'm aware of was the PSTAR by Kris Subbarao in the early 80s. This was later picked up by folks at SERI, now NREL and carried into newer analysis, for example, the recent work with BESTEST EX by Judkoff and Neymark for residential. There was also the mid 90s work by Manke and Hittle that demonstrated the use of empirical parameters, sometimes that were physically unreasonable but gave the best fit. There was also a bit of work done by Palmiter on black and gray box methods, and the "test-hut" work published by Yaeger in the late 1980s. Other works include Mazzucchi, and Kaplan, and of course the work by Hsieh et al. at Princeton. You can pick up the thread on these by reading the literature searches in one or more of the thesis on our web site by Bronson, Bou Saada, Abbas, Song, Kim and others on calibrated simulation.



Hope this helps.



jeff



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Jeff S. Haberl, Ph.D.,P.E., FASHRAE..............jhaberl at tamu.edu

Professor............................................................Office Ph: 979-845-6507

Department of Architecture.............................Lab Ph:979-845-6065

Energy Systems Laboratory.............................FAX: 979-862-2457

Texas A&M University.....................................77843-3581

College Station, Texas, USA, 77843..................URL:www.esl.tamu.edu

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________________________________
From: bldg-sim-bounces at lists.onebuilding.org [bldg-sim-bounces at lists.onebuilding.org] on behalf of Richard M Sapwell [ecodesigns at tpg.com.au]
Sent: Friday, April 08, 2011 9:26 PM
To: bldg-sim at lists.onebuilding.org
Subject: [Bldg-sim] Existing building thermal performance assessment methodology?

G'day,

Can anyone suggest other then a software program  a 'methodology' for the assessment of the thermal performance of existing commercial buildings?

Determining the occupants thermal comfort levels and the air indoor quality would be beneficial but not essential for the methodology.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Richard

ecodesigns know the elements, work with them
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