Abstract
Currently, the energy consumption study in buildings is critical in fulfilling the EU objectives to achieve carbon neutrality. There are several building energy simulation tools and other spreadsheets available on the market. One of the main software tools, the EnergyPlus software, and two Excel spreadsheets developed in Portugal to assess the thermal loads and annual energy consumption in commercial and service buildings are used and compared in this work. A simple 3D building was modeled using SketchUp2017, and the schedules, materials, and thermal loads were defined for a typical residential and service building to perform this analysis.
Concerning the thermal loads, the simulation of a building without insulation using EnergyPlus showed results for heating and cooling, respectively 10% lower and 6% higher when compared with those predicted by RECS with the transient spreadsheet. Comparing with the simplified spreadsheet for the REH, the discrepancy is more significant. These discrepancies occur because RECS and REH use a simple methodology compared with EnergyPlus. The results for heating and cooling in EnergyPlus when a building has insulation show that the heating and cooling demand is 46% lower and 25% higher compared with the results with RECS, respectively. These results show that insulation reduces the heating demand although it impairs the cooling demand when compared with the building without insulation.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to express their gratitude for the support given by FCT within the R&D Units Project Scope UIDB/00319/2020 (ALGORITMI) and R&D Units Project Scope UIDP/04077/2020 (MEtRICs).
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Esteves, D., Silva, J., Martins, L., Teixeira, J., Teixeira, S. (2021). Building Energy Performance: Comparison Between EnergyPlus and Other Certified Tools. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2021. ICCSA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12949. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86653-2_36
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