Boundary Conditions Accuracy Effect on the Numerical Simulations of the Thermal Performance of Building Elements

Paris A. Fokaides, Angeliki Kylili and Ioannis Kyriakides
Additional contact information
Paris A. Fokaides: School of Engineering, Frederick University, Nicosia 1036, Cyprus
Angeliki Kylili: School of Engineering, Frederick University, Nicosia 1036, Cyprus
Ioannis Kyriakides: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Nicosia, Nicosia 2147, Cyprus

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 6, 1-19

Abstract: Numerical simulation is widely used in the field of computational building physics for the definition of the thermal performance of building elements. An integral component of numerical simulation using finite elements is the boundary conditions, which, in the case of simulating the thermal performance of a building element, are usually expressed in terms of the external surface temperature as a function of time. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the accuracy of the boundary conditions on the thermal performance simulation of building elements. The assumption that the temperature versus time is a sinusoidal function, applied in standard methods, is comparatively assessed with the actual function for diverse climatic conditions using finite elements simulation. The findings of the analysis indicate that the sinusoidal function fails to accurately simulate real boundary conditions. The originality of this study lies within the adoption of a signal reconstruction algorithm, which follows a novel approach by reconstructing the actual temperature versus time signal for the simulation of the actual boundary conditions.

Keywords: building envelope; numerical simulation; boundary condition; finite element method; sinusoidal function (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 (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/6/1520/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/6/1520/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:6:p:1520-:d:151895

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().