Impact by Estimation Error of Hourly Horizontal Global Solar Radiation Models on Building Energy Performance Analysis on Building Energy Performance Analysis

Abstract

Impact by estimation error of hourly horizontal global solar radiation in a weather file on building energy performance was investigated in this study. There are a number of weather parameters in a given weather file, such as dry-bulb, wet-bulb, dew-point temperatures; wind speed and direction; station pressure; and solar radiation. Most of them except for solar radiation can be easily obtained from weather stations located on the sites worldwide. However, most weather stations, also including the ones in South Korea, do not measure solar radiation because the measuring equipment for solar radiation is expensive and difficult to maintain. For this reason, many researchers have studied solar radiation estimation models and suggested to apply them to predict solar radiation for different weather stations in South Korea, where the solar radiation is not measured. However, only a few studies have been conducted to identify the impact caused by estimation errors of various solar radiation models on building energy performance analysis. Therefore, four different weather files using different horizontal global solar radiation data, one using measured global solar radiation, and the other three using estimated global solar radiation models, which are Cloud-cover Radiation Model (CRM), Zhang and Huang Model (ZHM), and Meteorological Radiation Model (MRM) were packed into TRY formatted weather files in this study. These were then used for office building energy simulations to compare their energy consumptions, and the results showed that there were differences in the energy consumptions due to these four different solar radiation data. Additionally, it was found that using hourly solar radiation from the estimation models, which had a similar hourly tendency with the hourly measured solar radiation, was the most important key for precise building energy simulation analysis rather than using the solar models that had the best of the monthly or yearly statistical indices.