Prediction of Indoor Climate and Long-Term Air Quality Using the BTA-AQP Model: Part II. Overall Model Evaluation and Application

Abstract

The objective of this research was to develop a building thermal analysis and air quality predictive (BTA-AQP) model to predict indoor climate and long-term air quality (NH3, H2S, and CO2 concentrations and emissions) for swine deep-pit buildings. This article presents part II of this research, in which the performance of the BTA-AQP model is evaluated using typical meteorological year (TMY3) data in predicting long-term air quality trends. The good model performance ratings (MAE/SD 0.5 for all the predicted parameters) and the graphical presentations reveal that the BTA-AQP model was able to accurately forecast indoor climate and gas concentrations and emissions for swine deep-pit buildings. By comparing the air quality results simulated by the BTA-AQP model using the TMY3 data set with those from a five-year local weather data set, it was found that the TMY3-based predictions followed the long-term mean patterns well, which indicates that the TMY3 data could be used to represent the long-term expectations of source air quality. Future work is needed to improve the accuracy of the BTA-AQP model in terms of four main sources of error: (1) uncertainties in air quality data, (2) prediction errors of the BTA model, (3) prediction errors of the AQP model, and (4) bias errors of the TMY3 and its limited application.