Comparative Analysis of Infrared Thermography and CFD Modelling for Assessing the Thermal Performance of Buildings

Abstract

Energy consumption in the building sector has increased significantly in the developed countries over the last decades. For this reason, the new European standards have become stricter in terms of energy saving. This paper establishes a comparison between using infrared thermography for technical building inspection and modelling with Computational Flow Dynamics (CFD) tools for the study of thermal performance of the building. The results show that the use of this type of tools gives a reliable response with the difference in thermal changes lower than 0.5 °C with respect to the data taken in situ. Moreover, these simulators of flow dynamics allow to evaluate the efficiency of proposed measures for energy savings and to obtain a reliable approximation to thermal comfort applying the improvement, deepening in the surface analysis of infrared thermography before performing rehabilitation project. In this research, Predicted Mean Vote Index (PMV) comfort index of 0.7 for a living room and 0.6 for a bedroom were obtained, that corresponds to C class that includes values in the range of −0.7 < PMV < 0.7 according to the standard UNE-EN 7730.

Keywords

• Computational Flow Dynamics (CFD analysis)
• infrared thermography
• energy rating
• energy rehabilitation
• thermal comfort