IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/rensus/v40y2014icp171-184.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Comfort reliability evaluation of building designs by stochastic hygrothermal simulation

Author

Listed:
  • Sulaiman, Halimi
  • Olsina, Fernando

Abstract

Outdoor climate jointly with architectonic design, housing materials, and construction system determine thermal performance of buildings and their ability to deliver comfortable conditions to occupants. Buildings must provide comfortable indoor environment which should be reasonably assured regardless of outdoor weather fluctuations. This paper presents a methodology for quantitatively measuring the hygrothermal discomfort risk of any building design. By combining a numeric model of the building hygrothermal response with stochastic simulation techniques, occurrence probability, expected frequency and duration of discomfort events in each thermal zone can be estimated. The article presents fundamental notions on probabilistic hygrothermal risk assessment, describes the developed numerical simulation models and introduces comfort reliability indexes. In order to illustrate the practicability of the proposed approach in the context of the design process, the methodology was applied to a prototype of a residential house conventionally built and acclimatized. The materials and construction system reflect typical residential housing in the region of study. A bioclimatic variant of the same building design is also evaluated. Monte Carlo simulations of the building׳s thermal response under stochastic weather conditions allow identifying infrequent but critical situations in which the building is unable to meet comfort requirements. Statistical analysis of simulation results is performed and condensed in meaningful probabilistic indices for objectively measuring comfort reliability. By means of these metrics, shortcoming of the architectonic design can be revealed and properly amended. In addition, comfort reliability and risk indices facilitate the comparison of alternative thermal building designs on a fair basis. The proposed methodology and the developed models are general and they can be applied without constraints to any building design under a wide variety of climates.

Suggested Citation

  • Sulaiman, Halimi & Olsina, Fernando, 2014. "Comfort reliability evaluation of building designs by stochastic hygrothermal simulation," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 171-184.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:rensus:v:40:y:2014:i:c:p:171-184
    DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2014.07.162
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032114006145
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.rser.2014.07.162?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Zio, E. & Pedroni, N., 2009. "Building confidence in the reliability assessment of thermal-hydraulic passive systems," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 94(2), pages 268-281.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anand, Y. & Gupta, A. & Tyagi, S.K. & Anand, S., 2016. "Computational fluid dynamics, a building simulation tool for achieving sustainable buildings," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 1174-1185.
    2. Ernesto Antonini & Vincenzo Vodola & Jacopo Gaspari & Michaela De Giglio, 2020. "Outdoor Wellbeing and Quality of Life: A Scientific Literature Review on Thermal Comfort," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(8), pages 1-22, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zio, E. & Pedroni, N., 2012. "Monte Carlo simulation-based sensitivity analysis of the model of a thermal–hydraulic passive system," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 90-106.
    2. Zio, E. & Pedroni, N., 2009. "Functional failure analysis of a thermal–hydraulic passive system by means of Line Sampling," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 94(11), pages 1764-1781.
    3. Mi, Jinhua & Li, Yan-Feng & Yang, Yuan-Jian & Peng, Weiwen & Huang, Hong-Zhong, 2016. "Reliability assessment of complex electromechanical systems under epistemic uncertainty," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 1-15.
    4. P Viveros & E Zio & F Kristjanpoller & A Arata, 2012. "Integrated system reliability and productive capacity analysis of a production line. A case study for a Chilean mining process," Journal of Risk and Reliability, , vol. 226(3), pages 305-317, June.
    5. Francesco Di Maio & Nicola Pedroni & Barnabás Tóth & Luciano Burgazzi & Enrico Zio, 2021. "Reliability Assessment of Passive Safety Systems for Nuclear Energy Applications: State-of-the-Art and Open Issues," Energies, MDPI, vol. 14(15), pages 1-17, August.
    6. Olatubosun, Samuel Abiodun & Zhang, Zhijian, 2019. "Dependency consideration of passive system reliability by coupled stress-strength interference/functional relations of parameters approach," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 188(C), pages 549-560.
    7. Bas, Esra, 2011. "An investment plan for preventing child injuries using risk priority number of failure mode and effects analysis methodology and a multi-objective, multi-dimensional mixed 0-1 knapsack model," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 96(7), pages 748-756.
    8. Wang, Wei & Maio, Francesco Di & Zio, Enrico, 2017. "Three-loop Monte Carlo simulation approach to Multi-State Physics Modeling for system reliability assessment," Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Elsevier, vol. 167(C), pages 276-289.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:rensus:v:40:y:2014:i:c:p:171-184. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.