Maintaining Thermal Comfort of a Naturally Ventilated Residential House by Intelligently Actuating Windows

Date
2019-04-15
Authors
Pokhrel, M
Anderson, T
Lie, T
Supervisor
Item type
Conference Contribution
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong
Abstract

In New Zealand’s (NZ) mild climatic conditions, most residential houses are ventilated naturally, mainly by opening windows. However, maintaining the indoor thermal comfort characteristics of a house by modulating natural ventilation is particularly challenging, as the solution is not explicit. Determining a solution requires a technique that adjusts openable window area while encapsulating the complexity, dynamics, and nonlinearity associated with the natural ventilation driving forces and building thermal behavior. By verifying that there exists a significant potential of regulating indoor thermal comfort of a relatively airtight and insulated house by adjusting window openable area; this work additionally confirmed an excellent capability of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique in predicting air temperature time-series of the naturally ventilated house. On the basis of these examinations, this work particularly developed a co-simulation strategy between building thermal-airflow model and the ANN model and demonstrated that windows could be regulated intelligently to modulate the natural ventilation and maintain indoor thermal comfort level during the summer period by applying Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based predictive controller technique.

Description
Keywords
Natural Ventilation , Thermal Comfort , Artificial Neural Network (ANN) , Residential House , Intelligent Windows
Source
Intelligent & Informed, Proceedings of the 24th International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) 2019, Volume 1, 705-714. © 2019 and published by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.
DOI
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NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in (see Citation). The original publication is available at (see Publisher's Version).