Impact of internal heat gain profiles on the design cooling capacity of landscaped offices

Abstract

Using passive methods in façade design for controlling heating and cooling needs is an important prerequisite for constructing cost-effective nearly zero-energy buildings. Optimal control of solar heat gains reduces the cooling demand and the size of the active cooling systems. However, applying such methods increases the impact of internal heat gains on the heat balance of the buildings, and accordingly also the dimensions of cooling systems. Therefore, a good model of internal heat gains is needed for a reliable and optimal sizing of the cooling sources. This paper aims to bring understanding to developing internal heat gains models for sizing the cooling systems. For this purpose, several weekly internal heat gain profiles were selected from a large set of tenant-based electricity use measured in 4 office buildings in Tallinn. The selection was based on maximum daily or weekly peak loads of an office space per floor area. The selected profiles and the schedule of EN 16798-1 were used to dimension ideal coolers in the zones of a generic floor model with landscaped offices developed in IDA-ICE 4.8. The model had variable window sizes and thermal mass of the building materials. Finally, the internal heat gains models resulting in the largest cooling capacity were identified. We found that utilizing thermal mass can reduce the cooling system size by up to 7% on average and the models with big windows and light structure need the largest cooling systems. The cooling loads obtained with the profile of EN 16798-1 did not significantly differ from the average of other profiles' results. This paper focused mainly on the zonal dimensioning of cooling systems, therefore a more in-depth analysis of the different occupancy patterns as well as developing models for dimensioning the cooling system at the building level, is needed.