Article
Thermal modeling of existing buildings in high-fidelity simulators: A novel, practical methodology
Author/s | Borja Conde, José Antonio
Witheephanich, K. Coronel Toro, Juan Francisco Limón Marruedo, Daniel |
Department | Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Ingeniería Energética |
Publication Date | 2023-08 |
Deposit Date | 2023-05-22 |
Abstract | Optimizing efficiency in the operation of the HVAC system of existing buildings requires the construction of a thermal dynamic model of the building, which may be challenging because architectural metadata may be missing ... Optimizing efficiency in the operation of the HVAC system of existing buildings requires the construction of a thermal dynamic model of the building, which may be challenging because architectural metadata may be missing or obsolete. Based on a suitable set of measured data, this paper presents a novel practical methodology to create and automatically derive thermal models of existing buildings in high-fidelity simulators for energy management. To this end, the philosophy of grey-box strategies is followed to simplify the modeling and avoid the requirement of architectural metadata, facilitating and expediting the process. First, a building model with a highly reduced number of parameters is constructed by exploiting the existing similarities in the materials of the buildings and simplifying their elements to a simple one-layer parameterization. Then, the parameters of the derived model are iteratively updated while minimizing the error between the real temperature evolution and that generated by the model being identified. For this purpose, data of the room air temperature, estimated occupancy, weather conditions, and variables of the HVAC system are assumed to be available in suitable zones of the building to apply the creation and identification processes of the model, allowing that a whole digital twin of the building is constructed. The methodology is presented by its application to a real case study: the Nimbus Research Centre building at Munster Technological University, located in Cork (Ireland). The high-fidelity simulator software TRNSYS is used for the modeling task, together with the GenOpt optimization program. The results demonstrate that the proposed methodology yields a highly accurate model of the building, capable of representing reality with RMSE values consistently below during open-loop validation periods of up to four days. The findings suggest that this methodology may outperform other modeling techniques reported in the literature. Importantly, the proposed technique is less complex and time-consuming to implement than many of the alternatives. |
Funding agencies | Junta de Andalucía and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) Grant P20_00546 Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) Grant PID2019-106212RB-C41/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 Ministerio de Universidades (Spain) Grant FPU20/02023 European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 676760 - TOPAs European Union's programme Erasmus+ 2021-22 |
Project ID. | P20_00546
PID2019-106212RB-C41/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 FPU20/02023 EU H2020 676760 - TOPAs Erasmus+ 2021-22 |
Files | Size | Format | View | Description |
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EB_borja-conde_2023_thermal.pdf | 1.434Mb | [PDF] | View/ | |
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as: Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 Estados Unidos de América
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