Auditing and design evaluation of building automation and control systems based on eu.bac system audit-Danish case study

Improving the energy performance of buildings will prove vital for countries worldwide to reduce their energy consumption and emissions.A key player in reaching this goal is building automation and control,as having well-designed and operated building automation and control systems(BACS)provide large capabilities in optimizing the energy performance of different systems.In this regard,building owners and planners must be able to assess and evaluate the current status of their BACS and identify potential improvements.While there has been a large block of work done in Denmark along with regulations aiming to audit the overall building performance and individual systems characteristics,very little has been done in the field of auditing the building automation and control system and evaluating its structure and operation patterns.This lack of systematic BACS auditing and evaluation in Danish buildings is addressed in this work with the first implementation and evaluation of the eu.bac System methodology in a university office building.The building was found to comply with the lowest automation and control class E.Two BACS retrofit packages were proposed and evaluated,and energy savings up to 28.5%are reported.The preliminary assessment results reported demonstrate the potential of building automation and control retrofit measures in a combined holistic improvement package alongside building envelope upgrade.In addition,the impact of the eu.bac System improvements and labeling on the building’s classification based on the recent Danish building regulation BR18 is evaluated.The study discusses the feasibility of eu.bac System tool implementation in Danish buildings and suggests improvements.It also correlates and compares the eu.bac System audit to the upcoming European SRI instrument.In light of the huge efforts to digitalize the Danish energy sector,ensuring proper design and operation of BACS is of great importance.Thus,a systematic and methodical BACS auditing and evaluation methodology will be a crucial part of buildings’initial and retro-commissioning platforms.

Assessment of Minimizing the Environmental Functions Conflict in Buildings

Some building components are responsible for achieving more than one environmental function, these functions are usually of different requirements that can never be done by the same actions, and they are usually connected to changeable internal and external environment characteristics that vary among them. Minimizing the conflict of achieving the different environmental functions is an important challenge for all designers. Achieving a continuous thermal and optical comfort in an internal building space using the same window is an example of this challenge, as they have different requirements that may be sometimes contrary. It should be notable that there are a lot of recent technologies that may be used to find solutions for such a conflict. The Environmental Assessment Methods of Buildings appeared to set the principles of the optimum relation between buildings and their environment, they also could be used to encourage designers to reach the best environmental relations, and award them by main or additional assessment points. The research paper proposes to use the Environmental Assessment Methods of Buildings to assess the building ability of minimizing its environmental functions achievement conflict. This proposal depends on determining the inconsistency assessment items that depend on common building components to be achieved, and then determining the time periods that these items are achieved together within, to indicate the time periods without conflicting. Thus, the paper aims to raise the building environmental value in the assessment when the designer succeeds to minimize the expected conflict of the building environmental functions.

A Practical Approach to Representation of Real-time Building Control Applications in Simulation

Computer based automation and control systems are becoming increasingly important in smart sustainable buildings,often referred to as automated buildings(ABs),in order to automatically control,optimize and supervise a wide range of building performance applications over a network while minimizing energy consumption and associated green house gas emission.This technology generally refers to building automation and control systems(BACS)architecture.Instead of costly and time-consuming experiments,this paper focuses on development and design of a distributed dynamic simulation environment with the capability to represent BACS architecture in simulation by run-time coupling two or more different software tools over a network.This involves using distributed dynamic simulations as means to analyze the performance and enhance networked real-time control systems in ABs and improve the functions of real BACS technology.The application and capability of this new dynamic simulation environment are demonstrated by an experimental design,in this paper.