EXTRACTING DYNAMIC INFORMATION FROM WHOLE-BUILDING ENERGY MODELS

Whole-building energy models are used in practice to predict energy and comfort for an entire building given its architectural and built state, external stimuli from weather; and internal behavior of both the equipment and occupants of the building. There exists both open source and commercial software for simulating such cases for an entire year at sub-hourly reporting intervals. Unfortunately, the dynamics of the building are masked in assumptions included in the numerical routines that are often intertwined within the thermal physics. Because of this, control-oriented analysis is limited to performing exhaustive time-based simulations. In this paper, we describe a method to analytically extract the dynamics from a whole-building energy simulator for the purpose of control and dynamical systems analysis. In this way, the function of the energy simulator is only a user interface and a means to organize information inherent in the dynamics (capacitances, interaction between elements of the building, etc.). We provide a test case on a medium office building and illustrate some of its control-oriented dynamic properties using EnergyPlus as the simulator.