Modelling heat transfers in building by coupling reduced-order models

The components of the envelope models can be coupled by non-linear or by linear heat transfers laws, depending on the level of the expected accuracy. One way to obtain these models is to use a state representation approach for conduction heat transfer. The reduction technique used here consists in linear systems aggregation, which has been applied in several ways for large dynamical systems reduction. Different strategies of coupling these models are described and results are discussed. One of the major results of this paper is the important decrease of the computation time with no significant losses of accuracy. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.