The benchmark of a new SIMULINK library for the thermal dynamic simulation of buildings.

Nowadays, for NZEB buildings the complexity of the interactions between thermal plants and buildings is increasing. The reduction of the primary energy consumptions in NZEB is generally pursued by maximizing the use of renewable energy which gives a discontinuous contribution during the season; it becomes important to study in detail the dynamic interactions between the building and the adopted HVAC systems, by taking into account unsteady state behaviour of walls, roofs, windows and so on. This kind of analysis can be obtained by using conventional dynamic simulation software (i.e. TRNSYS, ESP-r, Energy Plus, DesignBuilder). It has been demonstrated that a detailed analysis of controlled HVAC systems can be also obtained by using SIMULINK and in the past open block libraries made in SIMULINK have been proposed for HVAC system analysis, like in the case of the CARNOT blockset. However, a weak point of CARNOT is still considered the building modelling due to its limited flexibility and completeness. For this reason, a new specific library named ALMABuild based on SIMULINK blocks for the dynamic modelling of a building is presented in this paper with the aim to integrate and improve the blocks already available in CARNOT. In ALMABuild the modelling of a building with SIMULINK is driven by means of a series of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). In this paper a benchmark of ALMABuild is shown by using TRNSYS as reference. The comparison evidenced a good agreement between the two methods. However, differences are present each time that the procedure indicated by the European Standard EN ISO 13790:2008 (and integrally followed by ALMABuild) is not in agreement with the procedure followed by TRNSYS (based on American standards).