2016 Volume 41 Issue 229 Pages 23-33
The integrated energy simulation (ES) tool BEST enables comprehensive energy conservation performance evaluations and the evaluation of various energy-saving measures in Japan. However, because the indoor space is modeled with one node for every zone, there are issues when evaluating the room comfort, when reproducing the behavior of air-conditioning systems, and in the prediction accuracy for energy-saving airconditioning systems or when the spatial distribution of the physical quantities in the room covers a particularly large space. For these reasons, several previous studies have been carried out using the coupled simulation of airconditioning systems and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In this paper, an outline of a coupled simulation focusing on air-conditioning system modules within BEST and a CFD analysis is presented. Furthermore, according to thought of BIM, a reduction method for the input trouble and a data linkage method of BEST and CFD are suggested for the purpose of correct information sharing and unification. As a case study using these methods, we carried out an analysis for an existing office building in Japan. As a result, a BEST-CFD coupled simulation made it possible to reproduce in detail the primary energy consumption of air conditioning along with the behavior of the indoor environment. The standalone BEST calculations could not accurately predict the transitions of heat and air between zones; therefore, differences in the amount of processed heat for each zone and the behavior of the air conditioners in comparison to the coupled simulation occurred. The coupled simulation verified that both the indoor environment and the heat processed by the air conditioning changed in response to a change in the region subject to air-conditioning control. In addition, the data linkage of BEST and CFD allowed for reductions in the labor of the input work and artificial mistakes.
