<p>The concept of evaluating the effects of uncertainty in energy modeling has been discussed in the past few years widely in academic environment. These evaluations have been mainly concentrated on architectural components of the buildings. Little effort has been done to investigate the effects of the uncertainty in the mechanical systems of the building on the energy modeling outcome. There has been a barrier against implementing the findings of the academic research into real world professional architectural and HVAC engineering design. The fact is that majority of the academic research in the field of uncertainty is done with software that are popular in academic environment but are not the choice of the professional engineers when performing real life building energy modeling. To help improving this disconnect between the academic and professional realm in this paper we will introduce a supplemental software that is written on a free platform (Python) and can easily be interlocked with the most popular software (e-Quest) used for energy modeling by professional firms. Using this supplementary program helps us to start with mechanical parameters such as efficiency of boilers and efficiency of chillers as it has been used in design document, and change the values associated with these efficiencies within the allowed tolerances by testing standards. Testing standards permit the manufacturers to allocate efficiency levels to their products when tested under standard conditions. These tolerances are the sources of uncertainty and therefore deviation of the energy performance of the actual system from the current simple energy modeling results. When this new analyzing opportunity is given to the actual engineers that are designing the buildings and its HVAC and other associated systems, they can utilize it to make important design and financial decisions regarding their projects.</p><p>After presenting the supplementary software in this paper, we will use it to evaluate the effects of uncertainty in chillers, boilers, pumps and fans efficiency on the outcome of energy model (energy consumption) for a typical multi-story office building. As a result, users will be able to compare the relative effects of higher or lower efficiency of the installed equipment (within the allowable tolerances given by the testing institutes) on the energy consumption for the building. This allows them to make financial decisions such as which equipment to specify with higher efficiency to make the most improvement in total energy consumption of the system. The paper also contributes to improving the energy consumption of the building by providing a tool that can be utilized for evaluating effects of many more parameters uncertainty when performing the energy modeling.</p>

Analyzing the Effects of HVAC Equipment Uncertainty in Building Energy Modeling for Professional Environment

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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