A simplified calculation method to evaluate heating and cooling loads of buildings

Space heating and cooling energy need of a building can be evaluated through three kinds of methods: the quasi-steady state method, the simple hourly method and detailed dynamic simulation methods. In this work the calculation procedure of the simple hourly method has been implemented in MATLAB and then tested on a very simple building. The results obtained in terms of monthly heating and cooling net energy demand have been compared with those coming from a detailed dynamic simulation software, TRNSYS. Furthermore, the possibility of using a simplified set of climatic data is explored. The aim is investigating the use of dynamic simulation tools when the climatic conditions are not known in detail. This could be useful for locations with inadequate climatic database (especially in growing countries), as well as to predict the heating and cooling demand of a building from weather forecast. Then the simplified weather conditions have been applied to the simplified dynamic calculation method. With the purpose of checking the accuracy of the resulting simplified method for energy demand calculation, four locations (Stockholm, London, Rome and Ouagadougou) have been considered for the simulations.