APPLICATION OF A WHOLE BUILDING SIMULATION TOOL FOR A REAL- LIFE BUILDING

This paper reports difficulties and issues in developing a building simulation model for a campus library building in Suwon City, South Korea. This work was initiated to assess the energy performance of a real building in collaboration with the campus facility management department. The paper reports issues in data gathering, development of an energy simulation model, and comparison of the simulation results with measurements. In data gathering, even though much relevant information was provided by the facility managers, the authors faced many problems in finding accurate information for simulation runs. In the paper, what issues and difficulties exist and how the authors handled those (e.g., treatment of missing and uncertain data) are discussed. Secondly, the issues in developing a building energy simulation model are discussed. In this phase, the following was handled how to zone a complex atypical building (7 stories with a vertical atrium in the center), how to model 2 chillers and 13 Air Handling Units (AHUs) serving different zones, and how to convert local weather data into the EnergyPlus weather data format. Lastly, the simulation results are compared with measured energy use. With this comparison, the difference between simulation prediction and measurement, what parameters cause uncertainty in simulation prediction, and how to minimize the uncertainty by inspecting the process of a real-life project are discussed.