Rahman, Quazi Samira; Luk, Tsz Hin Jeffrey; Siu, Chun Fai; Kwok, Helen H. L.; Chen, Weiwei; Cheng, Jack C. P.; (2021) Energy Consumption in HVAC System and Occupants' Thermal Comfort Optimization Using BIM-Supported Computational Approach. In: Tabet Aoul, Kheira Anissa and Shafiq, Mohammed Tariq and Attoye, Daniel Efurosibina, (eds.) ZEMCH 2021 International Conference Proceedings. (pp. pp. 572-584). ZEMCH: Dubai, UAE.

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Abstract

Presently, buildings are vastly responsible for total energy consumption and GHG emissions in Hong Kong with indoor comfort being a major concern for the building industry. Comfort involves control of temperature, humidity, air velocity and indoor air quality interacting with occupants. Building owners are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of comfort with minimal energy consumption for the building occupants. As such engineers and experts are being challenged to design systems that provide a comfortable and energy efficient environment to solve this problem. The main aim of this study is to evaluate the indoor built environment of the IAS lecture theatre at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). which is served by VAV type air-conditioning system and to investigate the effect of layout of diffusers on occupant thermal comfort in CFD as well as analyze energy consumption and CO2 emission by the system in eQuest. This study presents how Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can be utilized to address thermal comfort and energy efficiency in buildings by optimizing HVAC system to provide well controlled environment. Indoor temperature, air velocity, CO2 concentration, Predicted Vote Mean (PMV) and Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied (PPD) were selected as the factors of evaluation with lightings, space cooling and other equipment being simulated in eQuest for energy analysis. Multiple scenarios with different numbers of occupants at different locations were simulated to assess the thermal comfort range which found the current design of the HVAC system could not sustain the high internal loading from the occupants when either all the seats were occupied, or only the back zone was occupied with the front seats vacant. In this paper, alternative method has been proposed for HVAC layout to address the simulated result of uneven temperature distribution which indicated design problem of overheating at the back rows and over cooling at the front rows, to achieve the desired comfort range with optimized energy consumption.

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