Heat transfer inverse modeling of buildings using real time sensor data for operational energy efficiency improvement

Abstract

Development of an accurate heat transfer model of buildings is very important. This model can be used for analyzing energy efficiency of buildings, predicting energy consumption and providing decision support for energy efficient operation of buildings. Commercially available building energy simulation such as EnergyPlus, eQuest and TRNSYS can be used to develop the heat transfer models, but they require substantial effort to collect the needed data, which in some cases is not possible. In this study, we have developed an inverse approach, which, if properly set up, can calibrate heat transfer models for many buildings in automatic fashion based on mostly sensor data collected from each building. We have tested our approach using simulated and real sensor data and we demonstrate superior results using our approach. Copyright © 2011 by IPAC'11/EPS-AG.