The Significance of Time Step Size in Simulating the Thermal Performance of Buildings
Aiman Albatayneh, Dariusz Alterman, Adrian Page, Behdad Moghtaderi
Advances in Research · pp. 1–12 · Published 12 Sep 2015
10.9734/AIR/2015/20223Abstract
The determination of the internal air temperature of a building is pivotal to its design in the determination of heating and cooling loads and the assessment of the thermal comfort for the occupants. Autodesk CFD analysis is one of many application programs which can assist in calculating building internal air temperatures and it is expected that using a smaller time step size can provide more accurate results but long term simulations for complex building analysis is significantly lengthening computing time. To solve these issues a larger time step can be used. This speeds up the computing time and also results in a higher predicted (and more realistic) internal temperature fluctuation range. This is reported in this paper, where the larger time scale technique is used with an average capacity personal computer (PC) machines to perform the simulations. This fast Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation method is used to simulate the thermal performance of a series of existing housing test modules constructed using a range of walling systems. The performance of the proposed computing technique is assessed by comparing the internal air temperature of each building at the floor level. To find the time step which gives the most accurate simulation of the measured internal air temperature, CFD simulations were carried out for various time steps (15, 30, 60, 80, 100, 120, 150, 180 minutes); it was found that 80 and 100 minute time steps gave the most accurate representation of the real fluctuation. The fastest simulation with the most accurate results was for a 80/100 time step where more than 87% of the results fell within a 3°C range compared to the real data. This also required only 1% of the computing time compared to a 1 minute time step.
Cited by 20
Aiman Albatayneh, Tarek Tayara, Mustafa Jaradat · International Journal of Photoenergy · 2021
Aiman Albatayneh, Dariusz Alterman, Adrian Page · Energy Procedia · 2017
Aiman Albatayneh, Dariusz Alterman, Adrian Page · Buildings · 2020
Aiman Albatayneh, Dariusz Alterman, Adrian Page · Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Software Engineering and Information Management · 2018
Aiman Albatayneh, Dariusz Alterman, Adrian Page · Sustainability · 2018
Victoria Jayne Mawson, Ben Richard Hughes · Energy · 2021
Aiman Albatayneh, Dariusz Alterman, Adrian W. Page · Journal of Green Building · 2016
Victoria Jayne Mawson, Ben Richard Hughes · Energy · 2020
Aiman Albatayneh, Dariusz Alterman, Adrian Page · Energy Procedia · 2018
Aiman Albatayneh · Energy Reports · 2021
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