Coupled building simulation and CFD for real-time window and HVAC control in sports space

Abstract

Accurately predicting players’ thermal comfort in large sports spaces for real-time window and HVAC operations presents significant challenges due to non-uniform thermal distributions. Standalone building energy simulation (BES) typically assumes the entire targeted space as a uniform thermal zone, which fails to capture these variances. Conversely, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation can predict indoor thermal environments with precision but often struggles with determining accurate boundary conditions. This study introduces a coupled BES and CFD simulation method tailored for real-time window and HVAC control in sports spaces. A case study was conducted in a prototypical national fitness hall to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The thermal comfort and cooling energy results from the co-simulation-based control were compared with those from standalone EnergyPlus simulation-based control and fixed-schedule window and HVAC operations, which served as baselines. The results indicate that the proposed method enhanced thermal comfort by 68.5 % compared to constantly-scheduled window operations and achieved daily energy savings of up to 43.5 % versus constantly-scheduled HVAC operations. Furthermore, significant discrepancies in Average Predicted Mean Vote (PMV‾) or Average Adaptive Predicted Mean Vote (aPMV‾) as well as daily cooling energy consumption between the BES-CFD co-simulation and standalone EnergyPlus simulation were identified, ranging from -0.53 to 1.83 for PMV‾ (aPMV‾) and -2444.6 to 1266.5 kWh for cooling energy. This study contributes novel methods for real-time window and HVAC control in sports buildings towards thermally comfortable and energy-efficient sports environments.