Cooling indicators for free floating buildings – quantifying the impact of inhabitants’ actions using Temporal Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract

In the coming years, heat waves will be more and more frequent and severe. New buildings must ensure thermal comfort to the occupants despite hot summer conditions, using passive elements, such as solar shadings, night ventilation, limitations of heat gains. The real performance of such systems is very sensitive to occupants’ actions in the case of un-automated systems. In order to better understand and quantify the influence of different occupants’ actions (window opening, solar shading closing, etc) on the building thermal response, novel cooling indicators are proposed based on building energy simulation and global temporal sensitivity analyses. Partial signed variances are used to quantify the impact of each action in terms of intensity and duration. In the present work two indicators are proposed and discussed: cooling indicator and global cooling indicator. They are applied on a case study of an energy efficient detached house constructed in France. 1000 simulations are run, with random selection of actions’ parameters. Maximal temperatures in the main bedroom reach values between 27 and 33°C and are strongly impacted by night ventilation. The proposed cooling indicators aggregate the vast amount of information provided by the simulations and temporal sensitivity analyses and facilitate detailed investigations and comparative studies.