ALMABuild as a design tool for the analysis of the effect of the occupant behaviour on the energy building consumptions

Nowadays, a series of numerical tools that enables dynamic energy simulations of buildings are available to the designer. However, generally in this software the occupant behavior is neglected or accounted in a simplified way. This leads to a performance gap between predicted and real energy performance of a building. In this paper, the effect of occupant interactions with windows (i.e. openings and closing) on the selection of the optimal envelope configuration, able to maximize indoor comfort conditions and minimizes the seasonal heating energy consumption, are shown. Numerical simulations are performed for the whole year varying the window typology (i.e. double or triple pane), the insulation thickness of the envelope and the shadings. Simulations are repeated both considering and neglecting the occupant behavior. This kind of analysis has been performed by means of ALMABuild, a new SIMULINK open blockset devoted to energy building modelling, in which the Humphreys Adaptive Algorithm has been implemented for modeling the occupant behavior. The results obtained in this work confirm that the occupant behavior should be accounted for during the design phase of a new NZEB building in order to obtain more reliable estimation of the building energy consumptions and to achieve more comfortable thermal zones.