| The prevailing paradigm in indoor environment control (particularly in office buildings) often excludes contextual forces such as daylight and natural ventilation, partly because they could interfere with the “smooth” operation of mechanical conditioning systems for indoor air. Given the current indoor environmental control expectations in modern buildings, and given the outdoor climate constraints in various regions of the world, it is not likely that all buildings could be operated with passive technologies only. This necessitates the integration of natural ventilation into the design and operation of indoor environmental control systems. An obstacle in the way of such integration is the difficulty of predicting the behavior of passive environmental systems. For example, natural ventilation models for building are often either too crude to be useful for reliable control algorithms, or prohibitive in view of required computational resources. This research presents an on-site calibrated simulation-based approach to treat natural ventilation as an integral component of the operation buildings' thermal systems. Toward this end, a multi-zone air-flow model is used to predict the fresh air volume flows into the building interior as a function of building geometry, status of passive ventilation devices, and micro-climatic parameters. The predictions of this model are then compared with actual measurements in the target building, resulting in a statistical “wrapper” to improve the model's predictive capability for the target building. The resulting statistically augmented numeric multi-zone model is integrated as part of a simulation-based control algorithm for the operation of the buildings' thermal systems. |
