BESTEST and EN ISO 52016 Benchmarking of ALMABuild, a New Open-Source Simulink Tool for Dynamic Energy Modelling of Buildings

In this paper a new open source SIMULINK blockset, named ALMABuild, for the thermal dynamic modelling of a building is presented. SIMULINK, integrated with MATLAB, provides immediate access to an extensive range of analysis and design tools by means of which designers can easily combine, for instance, the energy dynamic simulation of the building-HVAC systems with multi-objective optimisation, avoiding heavy co-simulations involving different software platforms. ALMABuild proposes a simplified way to make the energy model of a building, in which the calculations are done per so called thermal zone, in agreement with EN ISO 52016. The user is driven towards the building modelling by means of a series of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). In this way the creation of an accurate model can also be achieved by designers lacking specific expertise in numerical computation. In this paper, the benchmarking of ALMABuild by following the BESTEST procedure is described. The agreement with the most popular commercial software for dynamic building energy simulation and with the predictions obtainable by following the simplified hourly calculation method proposed by EN ISO 52016 confirms that ALMABuild is able to guarantee an intuitive and accurate modelling of the thermal building physics. Firstly, analytical and empirical tests are presented, then comparative tests with the reference BESTEST programs, EnergyPlus and the hourly calculation method proposed by EN ISO 52016 are performed. The agreement with BESTEST reference data confirms that ALMABuild is able to model the thermal physics as well as these accepted methods.