Calibration and validation of a solar thermal system model in Modelica

Recent advancements in the domain of modeling physical processes offer opportunities to use equation based modeling environments, such as Modelica, for the simulation of building heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. The current work demonstrates Modelica capabilities in a case study of real building solar thermal system simulation. The simulated system is part of an innovative ENERGYbase building, designed according to the so called Passivhaus standard. Model calibration and validation procedure is developed to include optimization based parametric adjustments of component models using the monitoring data during a single week. The calibrated system adequately reproduces half a year of real system operation. Future work will concentrate on application of the developed calibration and validation methodology in the whole year overall building energy simulation.