The Simulation and Mapping of Building Performance Indicators based on European Weather Stations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, efficient method for mapping building performance indicators across Europe, enabling analysis of regional climate effects and visualization of potential building improvements.

Contribution

It presents a novel simulation and mapping methodology for indoor building performance parameters across Europe using virtual models based on external climate data.

Findings

Maps of indoor climate performance parameters can be generated in less than 15 minutes.

The method is applicable to any building type and useful for visualizing potential improvement measures.

The approach effectively analyzes regional climate influence on building energy use and indoor climate.

Abstract

Due to the climate change debate, a lot of research and maps of external climate parameters are available. However, maps of indoor climate performance parameters are still lacking. This paper presents a methodology for obtaining maps of performances of similar buildings that are virtually spread over whole Europe. The produced maps are useful for analyzing regional climate influence on building performance indicators such as energy use and indoor climate. This is shown using the Bestest building as a reference benchmark. An important application of the mapping tool is the visualization of potential building measures over the EU. Also the performances of single building components can be simulated and mapped. It is concluded that the presented method is efficient as it takes less than 15 minutes to simulate and produce the maps on a 2.6GHz/4GB computer. Moreover, the approach is applicable for any type of building.