Measurement and verification of solar irradiance and residential building simulation models for Australian climates

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Copyright: Copper, Jessie
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Abstract
The temperature responses of two dwellings in Sydney were monitored over the period of a year and compared to the outputs of two building energy simulation (BES) programs, AccuRate and EnergyPlus. The two programs achieved very similar outputs of zone temperatures when similar inputs and assumptions were made, with the exception of modelling roof cavities and ground coupled zones. In comparison to the measured response of the dwellings, discrepancies occurred between the measured and simulated results from both BES programs for roof cavity zones, whilst AccuRate also showed discrepancies for ground coupled zones and between the utilisation of the natural ventilation models. This thesis also presents findings from a comparative study investigating the useability of mathematical models to estimate global, direct and diffuse irradiance for 4 locations across Australia. No single model was consistently found to outperform the other models at estimating diffuse and direct irradiance, whilst the 6 variable Seo and Huang model achieved the best estimates of global irradiance. In particular, the diffuse/direct models lacked the ability to accurately estimate the diffuse fraction under clear sky conditions, whilst improvements in modelling global irradiance were possible if the modelled results were scaled to match the daily level of satellite derived insolation reported by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The worst estimates of global irradiance resulted from the Zhang and Huang model which is incorporated in EnergyPlus auxiliary weather generator program. To test the usability of the irradiance models, a comparison of the simulation outputs of a simple building was undertaken varying only the inputs of horizontal irradiance. The results indicated that the bias and uncertainty of the simulation outputs were low when global irradiance was known and only diffuse and direct irradiance were estimated. However, when global irradiance was unknown the level of bias and uncertainty increased significantly. Again the irradiance data generated via EnergyPlus auxiliary weather generator program achieved the worst results.
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Author(s)
Copper, Jessie
Supervisor(s)
Sproul, Alistair
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Publication Year
2012
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
UNSW Faculty
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