Latest developments in equation-based building energy simulation

Abstract

The design and planning of sustainable buildings requires flexible simulation tools that can be used for the creation of building energy systems with a high overall energy efficiency, as well as supporting a differentiated assessment of the indoor climate. For this purpose, building energy simulation tools like EnergyPlus or IDA ICE are used in the building industry and from architects. On the one hand, these type of tools are easy to use in practice, because they come with professional 3D-user interfaces, databases for building materials, elements, technologies. Further, they support the post processing phase of an simulation experiment in different manner. On the other hand, these tools are limited to their implemented physics and the geometries and structures of the analyzed building models cannot be changed in real-time during the simulation experiments. This represents a significant limitation for the research and development of new simulation methods in the field of building simulation. Applying the equation-based and object-oriented modeling language Modelica and appropriate tools and software methods can largely overcome these limitations, which can better explore new scientific issues in the field of energetic building simulation. This talk gives an overview about latest Modelica-based modeling and simulation technologies for the energy analysis of individual spaces, whole building energy systems and also city districts. It will be illustrated that these three different model scales can be efficiently supported by a combination of the equation-based and object-oriented Modelica approach with other software approaches like virtual reality (VR) environments on the room scale, building information modeling (BIM) and also building automation systems (BAS) on the building scale, and geographical information systems (GIS) on the district scale.