Abstract

Heating Ventilation and Air Condition (HVAC) systems have become an essential part of building equipment, ensuring superior Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), especially around Thermal Comfort and Interior Air Quality (IAQ). Conversely, energy efficiency is also becoming a growing topic of interest worldwide, as excessive power consumption and global warming are changing the way in which we engineer and integrate products. In countries subject to extreme weather conditions for example, such as Australia, HVAC energy consumption can represent up to 40% of overall building energy expenditures. In order to curb this trend, government policies such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) are promoting green HVAC through tax incentives. As a results, the correct design and integration and an HVAC system in a building can strongly affect its financial viability. New simulation capabilities can provide insights about the performance of an HVAC, and help improve its integration in the building, before even breaking ground on construction. In order to promote seamless coupling and change management at every stage of a project, 1D Heating Ventilation and Air Conditon system models and 3D building models need to be simulated in an integrated solution. This solution can include zonal 1D and detailed 3D representations of a building in order to investigate key performance indicators for energy consumption, thermal comfort and Interior Air Quality, and assess present and even future usage scenarios. In this paper, we will demonstrate how to size and integrate an HVAC system in a building, using Modelica based system models, focusing on thermal comfort and IAQ. We will first make use of fast turn-around time 1D solutions, before finally demonstrating the advantages of fully coupled 1D system modelling and 3D Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with integrated state of the art comfort modelling to balance HVAC energy efficiency and IEQ.