Conference Paper

Proceedings of Building Simulation 2021: 17th Conference of IBPSA

Update of ASHRAE Standard 140/BESTEST thermal fabric test cases

Zhou Xin ⁹, Joel Neymark ¹, Ronald Judkoff ², Michael Kummert ³, Ralph Muehleisen ⁴, John Allison ⁵, J. An ⁶, J. Glazer ⁷, R. Henninger ⁷, M. Hiller ⁸ , Y. Jiang ⁹ , A. Johannsen ¹⁰ , N. Kruis ¹¹, T. McDowell ¹², E. Ono ¹³ , P. Strachan ¹⁴, M. Witte ⁷, D. Yan ¹⁵, H. Yoshida ^16
1 J. Neymark & Associates, United States of America
² National Renewable Energy Laboratory, United States of America
³ Polytechnique Montréal, Canada
⁴ Argonne National Laboratory, United States of America
⁵ arbnco Ltd, United Kingdom
⁶ Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, China
⁷ GARD Analytics, Inc., United States
⁸ Transsolar Energietechnik GmbH, Germany
⁹ Southeast University, China
¹⁰ Alec Johannsen Consulting Engineers, South Africa
¹¹ Big Ladder Software, United States
¹² Thermal Energy System Specialists, United States
¹³ National University of Singapore, Singapore
¹⁴ University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom
¹⁵ Tsinghua University, China
¹⁶ Kyoto University (professor emeritus), Japan

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26868/25222708.2021.30365
Abstract: ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 140, Standard Method of Test for the Evaluation of Building Energy Analysis Computer Programs, is widely cited for evaluating software for use with performance-path energy efficiency analysis in conjunction with well-known energy-efficiency standards, including: ASHRAE Standard 90.1, the International Energy Conservation Code, and other international standards. The BESTEST (Building Energy Simulation Test) thermal fabric tests, originally published in 1995, comprise a portion of Standard 140. These are program-to-program comparative tests, where to assess model accuracy a tested program’s results are compared with the range of agreement of the results of other programs that are typically a set of vetted example results provided with Standard 140. This paper summarizes the work to update and adapt the building thermal fabric test cases to the current modeling state of the art. The original test specifications were extensively revised and then field tested with a variety of internationally developed simulation programs with time steps of one hour or less. The work resulted in a narrower range of agreement among the test suite example simulation results, where the narrowing may be attributable to less ambiguity in the test specification and improvements to building performance simulation software since 1995. The completed test suite has been integrated into ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 140.
Keywords: BESTEST, validation, building thermal fabric
Pages: 1490 - 1497
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