Transient building energy simulations are powerful design tools that are used for the estimation of HVAC demands and internal hygrothermal conditions of buildings. These calculations are commonly performed using a (often dated) typical meteorological year, generated from past weather measurements excluding extreme weather conditions. In this paper the results of multiyear building simulations performed considering coupled Heat and Moisture Transfer (HMT) in building materials are presented. A simple building is simulated in the city of Udine (Italy) using a weather record of 25 years. Performing a multiyear simulation allows to obtain a distribution of results instead of a single number for each variable. The small therm climate change is shown to influence thermal demands and internal conditions with multiyear effects. From this results it is possible to conclude that weather records used as weather files have to be periodically updated and that moisture transfer is relevant in energy and comfort calculations. Moreover, the simulations are performed using the software WUFI Plus and it is shown that using a thermal model for the building envelope could be a non negligible simplification for the comfort related calculations.

Heat and moisture (HM) transfer simulations of building envelopes and whole building energy simulations require adequate weather files. The common approach is to use weather data of reference years constructed from meteorological records. The weather record affects the capability of representing the real weather of the resulting reference years. In this paper the problem of the influence of the length of the records on the representativeness of the reference years is addressed and its effects are evaluated also for the applicative case of the moisture accumulation risk analysis with the Glaser Method and with DELPHIN 6, confirming that records shorter than 10 years could lead to less representative reference years. On the other hand, it is shown that reference years obtained from longer periods are not representative of the most recent years, which present higher dry-bulb air temperatures due to a short-term climate change effect observed in all the considered weather records. An alternative representative year (Moisture Representative Year) to be used in building energy simulations with a strong dependence on moisture is presented.

Modern electric and electronic equipment in energy-intensive industries, including electric steelmaking plants, are often housed in outdoor cabins. In a similar manner as data centres, such installations must be air conditioned to remove excess heat and to avoid damage to electric components. Cooling systems generally display a water–energy nexus behaviour, mainly depending on associated heat dissipation systems. Hence, it is desirable to identify configurations achieving both water and energy savings for such installations. This paper compares two alternative energy-saving configurations for air conditioning electric cabins at steelmaking sites—that is, an absorption cooling based system exploiting industrial waste heat, and an airside free-cooling-based system—against the traditional configuration. All systems were combined with either dry coolers or cooling towers for heat dissipation. We calculated water and carbon footprint indicators, primary energy demand and economic indicators by building a TRNSYS simulation model of the systems and applying it to 16 worldwide ASHRAE climate zones. In nearly all conditions, waste-heat recovery-based solutions were found to outperform both the baseline and the proposed free-cooling solution regarding energy demand and carbon footprint. When cooling towers were used, free cooling was a better option in terms water footprint in cold climates.

The purpose of this article is to present and validate a computationally efficient numerical approach for the calculation of the ground-coupled heat transfer in buildings with periodic boundary conditions. When the boundary conditions of the heat transfer problem are described by periodic functions, it is possible to consider the transient state problem as a quasi-stationary problem with considerable savings in terms of computational time. The method is presented in detail from a mathematical point of view, together with a validation for two simple cases of slab-on-grade thermal losses, four comparisons with the ISO 13370:2007 procedure, a case with a complex shape and an evaluation of the computational efficiency.