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2018 Building Performance Analysis Conference and SimBuild co-organized by ASHRAE and IBPSA-USA

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A Control-Oriented Building Envelope and HVAC System Simulation Model for a Typical Large Office Building

Sen Huang, Yan Chen, Paul Ehrlich, Draguna Vrabie
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA

Abstract: In this paper, we present a dynamic simulation model for a typical large office building in the U.S., which can be used as a virtual testbed to enable advanced control research for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. We employed EnergyPlus for calculating the building thermal load, and the Modelica Buildings library to model the dynamic behavior of the HVAC system. We used a functional mockup interface to enable run-time communication between the EnergyPlus model and the Modelica model. This simulation model can be driven by control inputs from the supervisory decision-making algorithms for advanced control system design and performance evaluation. To demonstrate the usage of the model, we performed the evaluation on two representative control sequences for large office buildings with this model. Simulation data allows us to compare the energy performance of these two sequences and captures the evolution of the system dynamics at a high temporal granularity.
Pages: 729 - 736
Paper:
simbuild2018_C101