Thermal Comfort, Models and Simulation

Comfortable interiors and improved indoor air quality

Since people spend most of their lives in the home, in a vehicle or at the workplace, new issues regarding thermal comfort, indoor air quality and the necessary technical systems are constantly arising. To evaluate potential solutions, we develop mathematical-physical models and integrate them into modern simulation tools. This allows us to assess the energy efficiency and user acceptance of air conditioning and ventilation concepts. We take into account aspects such as airflows in rooms and thermal radiation control, as well as the design of the corresponding systems and optimized operating and control strategies. In doing so, we implement building information models (BIM), semantic database structures (ontologies) and statistical modeling approaches (machine learning). To investigate room ventilation concepts in detail, we use our very own Indoor Environment Simulation Suite (IESS) developed at Fraunhofer IBP. With this tool, based on zonal flow simulations we can examine 3-D models of interiors to determine not only ventilation efficiency, climate comfort and air humidity but also the concentration of pollutants from different sources (CO2).

 

Indoor Environment Simulation Suite (IESS)

The Indoor Environment Simulation Suite (IESS) developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP is used to simulate indoor air flows and the resulting temperature and material distributions. Not only the interiors of buildings but also of aircraft and vehicles can be studied. For this purpose, the room to be examined is divided into zones that exchange air with each other.

 

Digital Building Twin

We use the digital twin of a real building to analyze its dynamic behavior with numerical simulation tools under different boundary conditions, thus generating an accurate basis for informed decisions.

 

Planning buildings with the aid of simulation

Existing building simulation programs offer very few possibilities for evaluating thermal comfort in rooms or buildings in a quick and methodical way. To solve this problem, the tool “NBB-Tool Thermal Comfort” with user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) was developed for use either in-situ or based on data from the building simulation.

 

DressMAN comfort measuring system

Objectively measuring how people perceive thermal comfort in a vehicle - that is possible thanks to the DressMAN and its sophisticated sensor system.

 

Reference projects