Author : Balsam H. Abed

The thermal performance of a single zone building at Baghdad city was studied under different wall construction. The building walls are insulated by expanded Polystyrene with different densities and different thicknesses. Depending on the energy balance equation, the MATLAB software is used to solve the thermal performance of the building. A number of nodes are used to simulate the building performance. To reduce the initial conditions influences, every model has submitted to three pre-simulations (warm-up) for the same day of August 21, with 25 oC initial temperature. A fully implicit scheme with a set simultaneous linear equations is used to solve the models and building thermal performance. Outdoor temperature and solar intensity were used as input parameters, and the output were the indoor air temperature and heat flow to the building through the building structure. The results showed that using insulation within the walls reduces the mean indoor temperature and damping the indoor temperature fluctuation. The density and thickness of polystyrene affect the indoor temperature and heat flow to the building insignificantly. Insulating northern wall shows insignificant effect on the indoor temperature; it is recommended to leave the southern wall without insulation.

Keywords: Building energy model, R C model, Thermal network

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.6, No.6 (Dec-2016)