001 -- Detailed Analysis of Microclimate and Its Impact on Thermal and Energy Performance of High-rise Buildings: A Case Study

Urban microclimate refers to the surrounding detailed environmental conditions around a building and building blocks in terms of local air temperature, heat transfer conditions, wind speed, and direction. This detailed information could affect building energy modeling significantly, especially in a dense urban context with many high-rise/medium- rise buildings. This study combined an urban microclimate model, CityFFD (City Fast Fluid Dynamics), with a building energy model, EnergyPlus. The integrated model was applied to study the microclimate impact on the cooling demand of a high-rise office building surrounded by many buildings in the city of Montreal, Canada, on a typical hot summer day. The integrated CityFFD + EnergyPlus model runs in a "Ping-Pong" manner at each time step. The building surface temperatures output from EnergyPlus were used as inputs of CityFFD and generate microclimate factors used as EenrgyPlus weather information instead of typical meteorological year (TMY) data or measured data in rural regions in the next time step. A comparison of the building cooling demand and indoor thermal conditions with/without the microclimate was presented to investigate the urban microclimate's significance in predicting building cooling demand and its impact.