Model of a floor that consists of five thermal zones.
The five room model is representative of one floor of the new construction medium office building for Chicago, IL, as described in the set of DOE Commercial Building Benchmarks (Deru et al, 2009). There are four perimeter zones and one core zone. The envelope thermal properties meet ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2004. The thermal room model computes transient heat conduction through walls, floors and ceilings and long-wave radiative heat exchange between surfaces. The convective heat transfer coefficient is computed based on the temperature difference between the surface and the room air. There is also a layer-by-layer short-wave radiation, long-wave radiation, convection and conduction heat transfer model for the windows. The model is similar to the Window 5 model and described in TARCOG 2006.
Each thermal zone can have air flow from the HVAC system, through leakages of the building envelope (except for the core zone) and through bi-directional air exchange through open doors that connect adjacent zones. The bi-directional air exchange is modeled based on the differences in static pressure between adjacent rooms at a reference height plus the difference in static pressure across the door height as a function of the difference in air density. Infiltration is a function of the flow imbalance of the HVAC system.
Deru M., K. Field, D. Studer, K. Benne, B. Griffith, P. Torcellini, M. Halverson, D. Winiarski, B. Liu, M. Rosenberg, J. Huang, M. Yazdanian, and D. Crawley. DOE commercial building research benchmarks for commercial buildings. Technical report, U.S. Department of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of Building Technologies, Washington, DC, 2009.
TARCOG 2006: Carli, Inc., TARCOG: Mathematical models for calculation of thermal performance of glazing systems with our without shading devices, Technical Report, Oct. 17, 2006.
lat as this is now obtained from the weather data reader.