A national laboratory of the U S Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy National Renewable Energy Laboratory Innovation for Our Energy Future A Methodology for Validating Building Energy Analysis Simulations R Judkoff D Wortman B O Doherty and J Burch National Renewable Energy Laboratory This work was performed during the early 1980s and the report was written in 1983 but not published It was however distributed informally to some experts in the field and was referenced as SERI TR 254 1508 It was recently prepared for publication but the information has not been updated NREL is operated by Midwest Research Institute Battelle Contract No DE AC36 99 GO10337 Technical Report NREL TP 550 42059 April 2008 A Methodology for Validating Building Energy Analysis Simulations R Judkoff D Wortman B O Doherty and J Burch National Renewable Energy Laboratory Prepared under Task No 54004000 National Renewable Energy Laboratory 1617 Cole Boulevard Golden Colorado 80401 3393 303 275 3000 www nrel gov Operated for the U S Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by Midwest Research Institute Battelle Contract No DE AC36 99 GO10337 Technical Report NREL TP 550 42059 April 2008 NOTICE This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States government Neither the United States government nor any agency thereof nor any of their employees makes any warranty express or implied or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy completeness or usefulness of any information apparatus product or process disclosed or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights Reference herein to any specific commercial product process or service by trade name trademark manufacturer or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement recommendation or favoring by the United States government or any agency thereof The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or any agency thereof Available electronically at http www osti gov bridge Available for a processing fee to U S Department of Energy and its contractors in paper from U S Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information P O Box 62 Oak Ridge TN 37831 0062 phone 865 576 8401 fax 865 576 5728 email mailto reports adonis osti gov Available for sale to the public in paper from U S Department of Commerce National Technical Information Service 5285 Port Royal Road Springfield VA 22161 phone 800 553 6847 fax 703 605 6900 email orders ntis fedworld gov online ordering http www ntis gov ordering htm Printed on paper containing at least 50 wastepaper including 20 postconsumer waste Foreword This is a publication of work that was almost completed in August 1983 Final publication was never completed at that time because of funding issues There was however a limited distribution of the final draft to leading experts in the field and the report has been referenced in a number of documents nationally and internationally Since that time great strides have been made in computer hardware It is now possible for a building design practitioner to run a full blown simulation of building energy performance on a laptop computer and there are literally hundreds of such computer programs throughout the world Thus there is renewed interest in the theory of how to validate building energy simulation programs We have therefore cleaned up the few cosmetic edits that remained in the previous final draft and formally published it as NREL TP 550 42059 originally SERI TR 2541508 Although the simulation programs referred to in this report have long since been replaced by many subsequent versions of software the underlying theory of how to validate diagnose and design good validation experiments has remained substantially unchanged since we first proposed this methodology i Executive Summary Objective To develop a validation methodology for building energy analysis simulations BEAS collect high quality unambiguous empirical data for validation and apply the validation methodology to the DOE 2 1 BLAST 2MRT BLAST 3 0 DEROB 3 DEROB 4 and SUNCAT 2 4 computer programs Discussion This report covers background information literature survey validation methodology comparative studies analytical verification empirical validation comparative evaluation of codes and conclusions Section 1 0 establishes the historical context in which the Solar Energy Research Institute SERI studies evolved The history of computerized building energy analysis is traced and the case is made that earlier methods do not contain algorithms that can accurately determine all heat flow quantities especially for natural heating and cooling applications These programs though versatile for conventional buildings are highly questionable for analyzing innovative design options Newer state of the art programs such as DOE 2 I BLAST 3 0 DEROB 4 and SUNCAT 2 4 have not yet been sufficiently validated over a wide enough range of parameters to be used with confidence Researchers representatives of the building industry and several government sponsored planning groups have expressed the need for a systematic approach to the validation issue Section 2 0 reviews a sampling of the literature on the validation of building energy analysis simulations which shows that previous validation studies left four areas needing further investigation Validation with empirical data from full scale buildings In previous studies there generally have not been sufficient data to understand observed differences between calculated and empirical results Little effort has been directed toward performing follow up experiments and reducing ambiguities in the data Furthermore data are lacking for buildings using natural environmental control systems Validation with empirical data from test cells Many validation studies have been done using single zone test cells however few investigators have confidence in the extrapolation from single to multi zone predictions Nevertheless there are few or no data from multi zone test cells or multi zone unoccupied buildings Analytical verification and code to code comparisons Most comparative software studies have been done on conventional buildings Studies on buildings that use natural environmental control systems are lacking Additionally previous comparative validation studies have not exploited the
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