Coupling building thermal network and control system, the first step to smart buildings

Abstract

Buildings are one of the main energy consumer and carbon emission sources in European countries. Population growth in cities may be effective for economic growth, but by considering overpopulated cities, making new efficient buildings and optimizing energy consumption in older ones may be a good solution for energy management and carbon reduction in them. For doing this, one needs to collect buildings data for months to get an idea about the energy consumption in a building. On the other hand, computer simulations may not provide very accurate results, but they can give a crude idea about energy consumption in buildings. There are many different tools to simulate energy consumption in buildings, among all of them simplified models provide fast and accurate results. Developing building model based on lumped capacitance method by means of resistance-capacitance (RC) circuits provides good results and a comprehensive schematic about the heat transfer in the building. In this paper, the application of thermal networks for building load calculation is introduced and it will be shown how effectively it can be used in control systems to make a smart building.