Fast Simulation Platform for Retrofitting Measures in Residential Heating

Energy efficiency aware building owners are facing a massive amount of different retrofitting options. However, a quantitative assessment of the different options requires a high level of technical expertise. In this contribution, a fast and novel simulation platform for the assessment of different residential heating system configurations is presented. This platform enables dynamic simulations of the complete heating system, calculating energy/heat consumption and comfort indicators for different heating systems during a full year in less than 5 s on a recent laptop. Another key feature of the platform is the inclusion of a large variety of different heat sources (oil/gas/biomass/carbon boilers, air/brine-water or sorption heat pumps), sensible thermal heat storages, as well as building models. Shortly, this system will be the core of a platform enabling interested users to calculate the energy consumption of different retrofitting options accurately. To validate the system models, the energy consumption of the three reference buildings (single family houses with an annual heating energy demand of 15, 45 and 100 kWh/m²) as per the IEA SHC Task 44 is calculated and compared with reference simulations from established simulation frameworks. The energy consumption of these buildings matches the reference values up to 5% for a full year simulation requiring calculations times between 3.3 and 3.7 s on a recent laptop.