Comparative Analysis of Infrared Thermography and CFD Modelling for Assessing the Thermal Performance of Buildings

Carlos Morón, Pablo Saiz, Daniel Ferrández and Rubén Felices
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Carlos Morón: Departamento de Tecnología de la Edificación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Pablo Saiz: Departamento de Economía Financiera, Contabilidad e Idioma Moderno, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Daniel Ferrández: Departamento de Tecnología de la Edificación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Rubén Felices: Departamento de Tecnología de la Edificación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 3, 1-19

Abstract: Energy consumption in the building sector has increased significantly in the developed countries over the last decades. For this reason, the new European standards have become stricter in terms of energy saving. This paper establishes a comparison between using infrared thermography for technical building inspection and modelling with Computational Flow Dynamics (CFD) tools for the study of thermal performance of the building. The results show that the use of this type of tools gives a reliable response with the difference in thermal changes lower than 0.5 °C with respect to the data taken in situ. Moreover, these simulators of flow dynamics allow to evaluate the efficiency of proposed measures for energy savings and to obtain a reliable approximation to thermal comfort applying the improvement, deepening in the surface analysis of infrared thermography before performing rehabilitation project. In this research, Predicted Mean Vote Index (PMV) comfort index of 0.7 for a living room and 0.6 for a bedroom were obtained, that corresponds to C class that includes values in the range of ?0.7 < PMV < 0.7 according to the standard UNE-EN 7730.

Keywords: Computational Flow Dynamics (CFD analysis); infrared thermography; energy rating; energy rehabilitation; thermal comfort (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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