Modelling the urban microclimate and its impact on the energy demand of buildings and building clusters

• Presented at: 13th Conference of the International Building Performance Simulation Association, Chambery, France, 26-28 August 2013
• Published in: Proceedings of BS 2013, p. 3483-3489
• International Building Performance Simulation Association, 2013

The urban microclimate (UMC) can strongly affect the building energy demand. In this paper, the impact of the UMC on the space heating and cooling energy demand of buildings is analysed for typical office buildings in street canyon configurations, using detailed building energy simulations (BES). Convective aspects of the UMC are modelled using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and data are transferred to BES, either by convective heat transfer coefficients or by directly coupling CFD and BES. Measured urban heat island intensities are additionally considered. Comparisons to stand-alone buildings show the large influence of the urban situation. We then outline multi-scale modelling concepts to consider UMC effects at larger urban scales, using a city energy simulation model and an adapted UMC model.

Keywords: Building energy demands ; Building energy simulations ; Convective heat transfer Coefficient ; Energy simulation ; Heating and cooling ; Multi-scale modelling ; Urban heat island intensities ; Urban microclimate

Reference

• EPFL-CONF-195745

Record created on 2014-01-14, modified on 2016-08-09