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Abstract
Accurate thermal bridging assessment is becoming more important not only to predict the peak thermal load and the year round heat flow,
but also to estimate the potential for condensation and mould growth in the heating season. This paper presents a new dynamic thermal
bridging assessment module that is integrated within a state-of-the-art, whole building simulation environment in order to have more realistic
boundary conditions. It integrates all inter-related energy subsystems that occur in buildings. From another point of view, it is a variable
resolution whole building simulation program that allows efficient assessment of thermal bridging. In order to encourage its employment, the
integrated environment had undergone rigorous validation tests and was furnished with a user-friendly interface and other user-friendly
features, such as the online help and exemplars.
# 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Built environment; Thermal bridging; Numerical modeling; Simulation; Energy; Validation
1. Introduction account during the design of buildings and their year round
environmental control systems.
In general, heat flow through building construction is a 1D In general, buildings have several thermal bridges, which
(i.e. in the direction perpendicular to the surface) because occur due to one or more of the following reasons.
thermal conductance and temperature differential in the
1. Change in thermal properties of building envelope in the
perpendicular direction are much greater than that in the
lateral direction (e.g. interface between concrete beam
lateral directions. However, localized multi-dimensional
and cement block).
heat conduction through building envelope is common. In
2. Change in construction thickness (e.g. a window within
some buildings, up to 50% of the elevation area is subjected
a wall).
to multi-dimensional heat conduction [1,2]. Recent publica-
3. Difference between internal and external surfaces areas
tions have shown that thermal resistance of building envel-
(e.g. edges and corners).
ope can be significantly reduced by thermal bridging
4. Heat generation within building construction (e.g. hot
through framing at corners and junctions [3–6]. Thermal
water pipe).
bridge is the part of building envelope through which heat
conduction is multi-dimensional. The multi-dimensional In addition, the legislation and energy awareness have led to
character of heat conduction affects the local temperature increase insulation levels in buildings, which implies
distribution and heat flow rate. In other words, thermal increased thermal resistance in the perpendicular direction.
bridging will make the internal surface temperature nearer Of course, the addition of insulation layers in building
to the other side environment temperature and causes a constructions does not affect the lateral thermal resistance
higher rate of heat flow between the two environments. for the remaining layers in the construction. Consequently,
While the internal surface temperature should be considered the difference between thermal conductance in the perpen-
in mould growth and condensation risk assessments during dicular and lateral directions is reduced. Hence, the potential
the heating season, higher heat flow rate should be taken into for multi-dimensional heat conduction in building construc-
tions is increased. Furthermore, the severity of the thermal
*
Tel.: þ965-562-2927; fax: þ965-561-8866. bridging due to the four reasons mentioned above has
E-mail address: abdnakhi@paaet.edu.kw (A.E. Ben-Nakhi). increased.
0378-7788/02/$ – see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 3 7 8 - 7 7 8 8 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 1 0 6 - 8
376 A.E. Ben-Nakhi / Energy and Buildings 35 (2003) 375–382
Fig. 1. A flow chart showing the integration of the new module within the ESP-r simulation environment.
A.E. Ben-Nakhi / Energy and Buildings 35 (2003) 375–382 379
heat source or sink terms. For example, the default ESP-r’s With respect to the employed discretization, a system
scheme for internal long-wave radiation can be put in the matrix is created. In this matrix each node (i.e. 1D and 3D) is
form represented by one equation. These equations are then
solved simultaneously with respect to the invoked control
e1 e2 sðA2 f2!1 T24 A1 f1!2 T14 Þ law. Two solution methods are available: direct and iterative.
q2!1 ¼
1 ð1 e1 Þð1 e2 Þf1!2 f2!1 The iterative method is the default one, as it requires less
XN
e1 e2 ð1 ei ÞsA2 f2!i fi!1 T24 storage space and it produces less round-off errors. The
þ adopted direct and iterative solution methods are Gauss’s
1 ð1 e1 Þð1 e2 Þð1 ei Þf1!2 f2!i fi!1
n¼1 elimination method and the Gauss–Seidel method, respec-
X
N
e1 e2 ð1 ei ÞsA2 f1!i fi!2 T14 tively. The adopted Gauss–Seidel method incorporates lin-
ear under-relaxation factor.
n¼1
1 ð1 e1 Þð1 e2 Þð1 ei Þf2!1 f1!i fi!2
For the defined local components, the default ESP-r space
where f1!2 is the geometric view factor between surface discretization will be employed and their associated char-
nodes 1 and 2, and N the total number of internal surface acteristic equations are created in the system matrix. The
nodes. Therefore, its counterpart in the 3D module, which is undefined local components will not be directly represented
based on the same theory, should be capable of dealing with in the system matrix. The imported 3D domain replaces
internal surfaces represented by multiple nodes. Accord- them. As in the 1D gridding, the internal surface nodes are
ingly, the internal nodes topology (its internal surface shape, connected with the space air node by convection and con-
location and emissivity) should be saved for the 3D module, nected with each other by radiation. For the internal radia-
while for the 1D case the required topology is obtained tion calculations, the 1D view factors are employed after
directly from the details of zone constructions. area weighting the 1D values and setting to zero the view
The local (i.e. 1D module) components can be set as factors between nodes within the same surface.
defined or not defined. The undefined components are those The fully implicit discretization scheme is employed
components that will be replaced by the imported domain. when the 3D modeling is invoked. This is because the fully
Therefore, in order to model 3D heat flow through, say, the implicit scheme is unconditionally stable, the coefficient
east and south walls, they should be set as undefined local generation process requires less CPU effort as compared
components and a 3D model of the two walls and the edge in with other implicit schemes, and the amplification factor is
between should be defined and imported. always positive, hence prevents oscillation in the results, as
The imported domain is defined with respect to a Carte- shown in Fig. 4.
sian coordinate system. The definition of the imported Based on the results obtained from the 3D module, the
domain requires three groups of data: grid data, material default 1D temperatures for the undefined local components
geometry and boundary conditions. The required grid data are estimated either directly for the 1D constructions or by
for the imported domain are the employed length unit (e.g. volume weighting for the 3D constructions. Because the 1D
mm or cm), number of gridding lines and the distance temperature distribution is required in the calculation of
between each two successive grid lines in each dimension. other thermal processes, such as short-wave radiation, heat
The group of grid data is used to facilitate a high level of absorption by transparent materials and convective heat
gridding flexibility. The internal and external boundaries are transfer coefficient.
referenced to existing dynamic boundaries in the 1D pro- At the result analyses level, the default options within the
blem. Similarly, the thermophysical properties of the ESP-r environment, such as heat fluxes and temperature
imported domain are defined by referencing them to existing distribution can be used after 3D simulation. In addition, the
layers within the 1D building constructions. new module allows monitoring the temperature profiles for
The simulation of a problem within the Simulator is several predefined nodes within the imported domain. This
performed in a three-stage process: discretization of the is an important option for condensation risk assessment.
problem, derivation of the simulation equation for the nodal Because of the generality of the 3D module, it can be used
system and simultaneous solution of the derived character- to model heat transfer through the ground. This is a major
istic equations. The default ESP-r space discretization error source in building energy simulation packages, which
approach is based on 1D heat conduction through building usually incorporate empirical ground temperatures at spe-
constructions. Accordingly, each inter-constructional node cified depths to approximate heat flow through the ground
has two heat conduction connections. However, construction [21]. Furthermore, the 3D module is capable of dealing with
surface nodes have only one conduction connection. heterogeneous thermophysical properties and boundary con-
Depending on the boundary conditions, the other connec- ditions for the ground.
tions for the construction surface node are defined. For In order to encourage the usage of the developed module, it
example, the internal surface nodes have one convection is furnished with the default ESP-r interface for the definition
connection with the zone air node and radiation connection of the imported domain. In addition, online help and exemplar
with other internal surface nodes. Furthermore, a climate are also provided. Beside that, the validation of the developed
data file defines the building external boundary variables. module is performed and presented in Section 4.
380 A.E. Ben-Nakhi / Energy and Buildings 35 (2003) 375–382
Fig. 2. A schematic diagram of the 3D multi-layered corner used in inter-model validation process.
2
VOLTRA is a tool developed by the Belgian Company, Physibel, for Fig. 4. A comparison between VOLTRA and ESP-r results for internal
3D transient heat conduction modeling. corner temperature profile.
A.E. Ben-Nakhi / Energy and Buildings 35 (2003) 375–382 381
ESP-r and the VOLTRA results. The results were not shown
since they almost overlap each other.
In the analytical verification, the results of ESP-r were
compared with the exact solution of transient 3D heat
conduction through a homogeneous slab. For a rectangular
parallelepiped domain (0
x
a, 0
y
b and
0
z
c) that is initially at 50 8C and for times t > 0,
the boundaries are defined by
@T
l þ hout T ¼ 0 at x ¼ 0 (6a)
@x
@T
l þ hin T ¼ 0 at x ¼ a (6b)
@x Fig. 5. A comparison between analytical and ESP-r results.
@T
¼ 0 at y ¼ 0 (6c) external ambient temperature was also intended to amplify
@y
the errors.
@T
l þ hy T ¼ 0 at y ¼ b (6d)
@y
5. Conclusions
@T
¼ 0 at z ¼ 0 (6e)
@z A new thermal bridging assessment module was developed
@T and integrated within a state-of-the-art, whole building simula-
l þ hz T ¼ 0 at z ¼ c (6f) tion environment (ESP-r). The developed tool is distinguished
@z
by the flexibility in domain definition, the lower numerical
Ozisik [26] has presented the general solution for multi- errors and the level of conflation with whole building simula-
dimensional homogeneous heat conduction problems. For tion package, which facilitated more pragmatic assessment of
the current problem, the solution can be written as thermal bridging through building constructions.
!
XXX bm cosðbm xÞ þ ðhout =lÞ sinðbm xÞ
aðb2m þg2n þZ2p Þt
Tðx; y; z; tÞ ¼ 8T e
ðbm þ ðhout =l2 ÞÞða þ ðhin =ðlðb2m þ ðh2in =l2 ÞÞÞÞÞ þ ðhout =lÞ
2 2
!
cosðgn yÞ cosðZp zÞðg2n þ ðh2y =l2 ÞÞðZ2p þ ðh2z =l2 ÞÞ
ðbðg2n þ ðh2y =l2 ÞÞ þ ðhy =lÞÞðcðZ2p þ ðh2z =l2 ÞÞ þ ðhz =lÞÞ
!
ðhout =lÞ þ bm sinðbm aÞ ðhout =lÞ cosðbm aÞ
sinðgn bÞ sinðZp cÞ (7)
bm gn Zp
where the eigenvalues bm , gn and Zp are the positive roots of The developed thermal bridging assessment tool is furn-
the following equations ished with effective CPU-related features, such as the cap-
ability of variable resolution simulation, employment of sparse
bm ðhout þ hin Þ
tanðbm aÞ ¼ (8) storage and matrix solution techniques, automatic importing
lðb2m ðhout hin =l2 ÞÞ of all required 1D data from the default 1D configuration.
hy In order to encourage the employment of the developed
gn tanðgn bÞ ¼ (9) tool in practice, it was furnished with a user-friendly interface
l
that is compatible with the whole building simulation pack-
hz age. In addition, both inter-model and analytical validations
Zp tanðZp cÞ ¼ (10)
l were performed to verify the adopted domain definition
The results of the analytical validation based on 500 eigen- procedure. The tool was equipped with further user-friendly
values of each of b, g and Z are shown in Fig. 5. A subroutine features, such as the online help and exemplars.
was developed for automatic estimation of the eigenvalues
based on the sign count method [27].
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