Development of a Simulation Analysis Environment for Ventilated Slab Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a simulation environment developed to assess the energy performance of hollow core ventilated slab systems. The developed simulation environment combines a transient finite difference solution of a ventilated slab system with an RC network model for a multi-floor building. The developed simulation environment takes into account ventilated slab system thermal bridge effects on the energy performance of multi-floor buildings. The predictions of the developed simulation environment are verified against those obtained from a detailed whole-building energy simulation tool. In addition, several parametric analyses are performed to determine the performance of ventilated slab systems under various design and operating conditions. In particular, the parametric analyses include the effect of supply air inlet temperature, air mass flow rate, hollow core depth, and hollow core diameter. In particular, it is found that due to increased heat transfer through slab edge increases due to thermal bridge effects, ventilated slab requires 5% more heating and 7% more cooling energy end-uses.