Conference Paper

Proceedings of eSim 2022: 12th Conference of IBPSA-Canada

Towards A New Methodology for Rapidly Modelling Existing Buildings in EnergyPlus

Kayle Campbell-Templeman, Mohammad Derakhti, William O'Brien
Carleton University, Canada

Abstract: Existing buildings have a high potential to increase their energy efficiency through retrofit projects. However, one of the most powerful tools for identifying energy efficiency measures, building performance simulation, is rarely applied to existing buildings. The proposed methodology leverages commercial building archetype models to serve as a base model into which changes are made to better represent an existing building. With this approach, the modelling efforts associated with building geometry, construction assemblies, HVAC systems, and scheduling are greatly reduced, and the modelling time can be reallocated to retrofit analysis. A case study of an 11-storey office building in Ottawa, Canada, was conducted and detailed in this paper. The rapidly built, calibrated model had a CV(RMSE) of 24.73% and NMBE of 0.68%. We expect the proposed methodology to be widely applicable to other buildings and promote the application of building performance simulation on existing buildings.
Keywords: Rapid Modelling, Building Archetypes, Reference Buildings, Existing Buildings, Calibration
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