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Classification of European climates for building energy simulation analyses.

Number: pap. 3516

Author(s) : PERNIGOTTO G., GASPARELLA A.

Summary

Several studies couple simulations of building systems and statistical techniques in order to draw conclusions easy to generalize under given constraints. To this extent, one of the most important input is dealing with climatic conditions: indeed, the weather data and the localities chosen for the analysis can seriously affect the representativeness of the simulation outcomes with respect to other regions. The first question to be answered regards the domain to which one or few reference climates should be representative, which can be related to thermal energy, ventilation, comfort analysis. As a common practice, national guidelines, heating and cooling degree-days scales and worldwide recognized climatic classifications are adopted. However, in some cases, these kinds of categorization are suitable only for specific applications. For example, the well-known and used Köppen-Geiger classification is based on annual or seasonal air temperatures and cumulative precipitation and highlights mainly the relationship between climate and vegetation. Consequently, while this classification can be very effective to distinguish ecological systems, it is expected to be not always suitable for building energy analysis. Similar considerations apply to ANSI/ASHRAE 90.1 and 90.2 classification. This work proposes a critical discussion of the main climate classification system adopted in Europe and presents a new classification of 66 European climates, based on clustering analysis. The aim is to identify a limited number of climatic zones and, for each one, a reference climate to be used for energy simulations. To this purpose, the hourly weather data of dry bulb temperature, relative humidity and global horizontal irradiation reported in typical and reference years have been considered. The clustering analysis has been performed according to a simplified approach based on the calculated monthly averages of the weather variables and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov non-parametric test has been used to select the most representative city for each cluster. The obtained climatic classes have been compared to Köppen-Geiger traditional ones, underlining the main changes and the impact for building energy simulation analyses.

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Pages: 11

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Details

  • Original title: Classification of European climates for building energy simulation analyses.
  • Record ID : 30024898
  • Languages: English
  • Source: 2018 Purdue Conferences. 5th International High Performance Buildings Conference at Purdue.
  • Publication date: 2018/07/09

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