Thermal Bridge Modeling and a Dynamic Analysis Method Using the Analogy of a Steady-State Thermal Bridge Analysis and System Identification Process for Building Energy Simulation: Methodology and Validation

Abstract

It is challenging to apply heat flow through a thermal bridge, which requires the analysis of 2D or 3D heat transfer to building energy simulation (BES). Research on the dynamic analysis of thermal bridges has been underway for many years, but their utilization remains low in BESs. This paper proposes a thermal bridge modeling and a dynamic analysis method that can be easily applied to BESs. The main idea begins with an analogy of the steady-state analysis of thermal bridges. As with steady-state analysis, the proposed method first divides the thermal bridge into a clear wall, where the heat flow is uniform, and the sections that are not the clear wall (the thermal bridge part). For the clear wall part, the method used in existing BESs is applied and analyzed. The thermal bridge part (TB part) is modeled with the linear time-invariant system (LTI system) and the system identification process is performed to find the transfer function. Then, the heat flow is obtained via a linear combination of the two parts. This method is validated by comparing the step, sinusoidal and annual outdoor temperature response of the finite differential method (FDM) simulation. When the thermal bridge was modeled as a third-order model, the root mean square error (RMSE) of annual heat flow with the FDM solution of heat flow through the entire wall was about 0.1 W.