Automatic 3D thermal zones creation for building energy simulation of existing residential buildings

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Abstract

Existing buildings now represent the greatest opportunity to improve building energy performance. Building energy simulation is becoming increasingly important, because the simulation results can assist the decision makers to reach the solution quickly for improving building energy efficiency and reducing environmental effects. However, most of the time, there is no available as-is 3D building models for the existing buildings to conduct energy simulation. Today, it is a common practice to obtain point clouds of existing buildings through 3D laser scanning technologies for as-is building modeling. Current methods using point clouds need manual processes to prepare thermal zones based on point clouds data, which is very time consuming and labor intensive. This paper introduces an automated thermal zone creation method to create both a building zone and room zones. A building thermal envelope was extracted from 3D point clouds. Then, 2D building floor plans were used as references to determine the location and size of each thermal zone accurately. A preliminary experiment has been conducted on a residential house to validate the proposed method, and the created building components and thermal zones were imported successfully into a building energy simulation program and ready for various energy analyses. © 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Construction Research Congress 2014: Construction in a Global Network - Proceedings of the 2014 Construction Research Congress

First Page

1014

Last Page

1022

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS