M. Hiller 1, S. Holst 1, T. Welfonder 1, A. Weber 2, M. Koschenz 2 TRANSSOLAR Energietechnik GmbH

1 CuriestraKe 2, D — 70563 Stuttgart, tel.: +49 711 / 67976 — 0, fax: +49 711 / 67976-11 welfonder@transsolar. com, http://www. transsolar. com

2 EMPA, Abteilung Energiesysteme/Haustechnik, CH-8600 Dubendorf

In the planning process and evaluation of innovative energy concepts simulation of buildings and systems gets more and more important. With the internationally well known software program TRNSYS [1] those simulations can be accomplished with a very high complexity.

The paper describes the Program TRNFLOW [2] which is a new add-on for TRNSYS for the simulation of natural ventilation. Also the main new features of the TRNSYS Version 16 released in Mai 2004 will be described.

Coupled Airflow Simulation — Current Situation

In order to achieve sustainable buildings new energy systems have been generated using natural effects to renew the air and lead away the heat. Examples are passive night cooling, double facades, solar chimneys, inside courtyards and so on. In these systems the mutual impacts of thermal and air flow behavior are very distinctive. Thus for numerical building simulation programs an integral approach is inevitable.

Already in 1993 in the frame of the IEA project Annex 23 the EMPA has developed a coupling of the multizone air flow model COMIS [3] with the thermal building and system simulation program TRNSYS and this was presented at the TRNSYS Userday 1994. The self-contained program COMIS was modified to TRNSYS Type 157 which can be linked to the thermal building model Type 56 within the TRNSYS-Deck via in — and outputs. The input information of the air flow model are read in by Type 157 from the standard COMIS Input File (CIF). The TRNSYS solver iterates the results of the two models until they match. Meanwhile the coupling has been successfully applied by several projects and simulation tasks. However thereby it was pointed out that the coupling is not very user-friendly and also requires a laborious handling. As the mutual classification of the data is made by hand the inputs tend to be incorrect. This error-proneness is also increased by the redundancies of the two input files. Furthermore it was proven that the TRNSYS solver is not always the perfect solution for such a system. The solver possibly has to be supported by additional convergence promoting Types what makes the handling again more difficult. Yet the need of an integral approach concerning thermal building dynamics and natural air exchange was clearly necessary. Therefor with TRNFLOW an improved version including a deepened integration of the two models (thermal and airflow) has been developed.

Multizone Air Flow Model in TRNFLOW and COMIS

Multizone air flow models idealize the building as a network of nodes and airflow links. A node represents a room volume which a set of state variables can be assigned to. Cracks, window joints and openings, shafts as well as ventilation components like inlets and outlets, ducts and fans represent the links. Boundary conditions and thereby also input factors are: State variables of the air in the zones Local wind pressures

The pressure pZ is a free parameter in the node which is evaluated according to the continuity equation (mass flow balance in the node = 0 ). This results in nZ equations where nZ represents the number of zones.

The relation between mass flow rate m and pressure difference dp and the zone pressure pZ is not linear. Therefor an iterative process is used to solve the system of equations. The mass flow rates per link and all dependent factors such as air exchange rates, air age etc. are calculated of the resulting zone pressures pZi. The calculation is static without an explicit consideration of the timestep. In principle calculating a condition based on a new time is independent of the previous timestep.