Simplified calculation model for predicting overheating in early design phases. A trade-off between simplicity and accuracy

Abstract

Early design support for summer comfort is increasingly important, considering the trend towards highly insulated buildings together with the importance of glass in contemporary architecture and the probability of higher outdoor temperatures due to climate change. From this perspective, this paper focuses on the integration of summer comfort evaluations of dwellings in early design phases. The reliability of a single heat-balance based calculation model for an early indication of overheating was extensively tested in a comparative analysis with a multi-zone dynamic simulation in TRNSYS. A parametric study was conducted for both the simplified approach and TRNSYS, to evaluate the most important simplifications assumed in the model and to determine the impact of reduced data-input and complexity on the accuracy.