Reduced Order Modelling of the Thermal Behaviour of an Office Space

Reduced Order Models (ROMs) have proven to be a valid and efficient approach to model the thermal behaviour of building zones. The main issues associated with the use of zonal/lumped models are how to (1) divide the domain (lumps) and (2) evaluate the parameters which characterise the lump-to-lump exchange of energy and momentum. The object of this research is to develop a methodology for the generation of ROMs from CFD models. The lumps of the ROM and their average property values are automatically extracted from the CFD models through user defined constraints. This methodology has been applied to validated CFD models of a zone of the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) Building in University College Cork (UCC). The ROM predicts temperature distribution in the domain with an average error lower than 2%. It is computationally efficient with an execution time of 3.45 seconds. Future steps in this research will be the development of the procedure to automatically extract the parameters which define lump-to-lump energy and momentum exchange. At the moment these parameters are evaluated through the minimisation of a cost function. The ROMs will also be utilised to predict the transient thermal behaviour of the building zone.