Review of the Assessment of Thermal Mass in Whole Building Performance Simulation Tools

Abstract

There is a plethora of dynamic Building Performance Simulation (BPS) tools on the market, that use different methods in terms of how they calculate the effect of thermal mass in buildings. This paper analyses the ability of six widely known BPS tools to calculate the thermal mass potential in whole BPS. The first stage is focused on the analysis of heating and cooling energy consumption, produced for a single-zone test building. This is done using the IEA Building Energy Simulation test (BESTEST) diagnostic method. The results are compared among the different BPS tools in order to examine the extent of variations. The second stage is a systematic comparison of the tools against some key parameters on the calculation methods and aims to investigate the implications of the inter-model variability on the simulation results. The results indicate that there is a divergence in the BPS predictions, and that the relative differences in the simulation results of the different BPS tools are always higher for high thermal mass.