Optimising Probabilistic Climate Bldg Sims. for School Overheating Assessments

CIBSE Technical Symposium, DeMontfort University, Leicester UK
6th and 7th September 2011

When designing buildings to last for many decades, it is important to consider future climate scenarios. The UK Climate Projections (UKCP’09) are probabilistic in nature and therefore, for a building designer, potentially time-consuming if applied to standard building simulation packages. The Low Carbon Futures project is investigating the use of such climate information with dynamic building simulation, where a single climate scenario can be represented by thousands of equally probable “climate years”. The project aims to quantify the risk of a building failing in the future due to climate-related overheating, and the effect of adaptations to that building to improve thermal comfort. This is achieved by the use of a bespoke overheating tool that can incorporate the effect of UKCP’09 climate projections, applied in this paper to a school building. The aim is to emulate the results of building software, using an initial simulation to calibrate a regression tool that is then applied to hundreds of other climate files. The structure of this tool will be discussed in detail in terms of the calculation procedure, the variables that have to be included in the regression tool, and also the form of output that might be useful to a building practitioner.