Integration of airflow zonal model and building energy simulation for large space buildings

Abstract

Contemporarily, large spaces prevail in many diverse and complex buildings, but meanwhile, incur more demanding requirements about thermal comfort and energy saving. Conventional building energy simulation (BES) computes the whole building based on the assumption of quiescent and uniform air. By contrast, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can obtain rich and detailed airflow results, but consumes tremendous computational time and resources. Then, the zonal model as an intermediate method between these two models has gradually approached to the visual field of the public, which plays an important role in rapidly predicting the overall thermal stratification of large spaces. Therefore, this paper discussed a practical and automatic method of integration of the zonal model and BES. In this way, annual dynamic energy consumption of large space buildings can be analysed, which will exhibit significant potential in the engineering field, especially at primary design stage.