SIMSPARK: AN OBJECT-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT TO PREDICT COUPLED HEAT AND MASS TRANSFERS IN BUILDINGS

The non-uniform behavior of the air inside a room, which is important in comfort analysis, can be evaluated by zonal models. While not as finegrained as CFD simulation, they do give useful information about temperature and moisture distributions that is not available from lumpedparameter models. Therefore, we have developed a tool, called SimSPARK, to automatically build dynamic zonal simulations of a building zone. Its model library includes different models to describe heat and moisture transfers across the building zone envelope, with two of them taking into account moisture adsorption/desorption by building materials. In this work, we describe in details the SimSPARK architecture and, the current zonal model library. To illustrate the applicability of this tool, we compare two zonal models including adsorption and desorption processes with one that ignores these phenomena, in a ventilated room composed of 27 zones. The results indicate that adsorption/desorption by building materials does affect indoor air behavior in a hot and humid climate.