Ricerc@Sapienza

The identification of techno-economically feasible decarbonisation paths and sustainability transitions for the built environment is a necessary task for research today and building stock renovation processes can act in synergy with innovative economic and technological development paradigms to achieve different types of benefits such as economic growth and employment, together with resource efficiency and sustainability for the whole sector.

High efficiency paradigms and rigorous normative standards for new and existing buildings are fundamental components of sustainability and energy transitions strategies today. However, optimistic assumptions and simplifications are often considered in the design phase and, even when detailed simulation tools are used, the validation of simulation results remains an issue. Further, empirical evidences indicate that the gap between predicted and measured performance can be quite large owing to different types of errors made in the building life cycle phases.

The dynamic thermal simulation has become a recognized instrument to predict building thermal behaviour. Many tools were developed in the last decades, which were independently validated, by considering different operating conditions, and rarely were directly compared in the same conditions. The objective of this work is to evaluate the prediction accuracy of the most popular building performance simulation tools, namely TRNSYS, EnergyPlus and IDA ICE, by means of a comparison of the simulated results and the experimental measurements detected under real operating conditions.

For the design of new buildings or buildings undergoing major renovations, the use of building performance simulation (BPS) tools is a key instrument to sizing the envelope or to select the best solution to be integrated. Nowadays, many BPS tools are available and are used by researchers and designers, each of which was independently validated, by considering different operating conditions, and rarely were directly compared in the same conditions.