CH-24-C031 - Leveraging Building Energy Models to Perform Thermal Resilience Analysis— A Novel Workflow

Extreme weather events are predicted to occur more frequently with global climate change, which could lead to more frequent and severe occurrences of disruptive events such as power outages. To prevent buildings from reaching uninhabitable thermal conditions during such events, there is a need to consider thermal resilience during the building design process. Currently, there is limited adoption of thermal resilience analysis in industry. Some of the barriers practitioners may face include acquiring necessary technical knowledge to make reasonable modeling assumptions in absence of practical technical guidelines, as well as investing additional time to manually configure models for additional analysis. To lower the operational barrier for industry, this paper proposes converting building performance simulation (BPS) models built for energy analysis – which are commonly developed during the new building design process for code compliance, into models for thermal resilience analysis. Illustrating the practicality of the concept, a prototype tool is created to convert EnergyPlus models for energy performance analysis into models for thermal autonomy analysis (analysis of indoor thermal conditions where the equipment is off). The functions demonstrated with the prototype tool include switching off equipment in BPS models and extracting key simulation outputs. The result of this work demonstrates that the use of generalized data tools for model conversion can ensure consistent modelling practices are utilized, and duplicate efforts of configuring building performance models can be avoided, allowing building designers to focus on improving building designs for both energy efficiency and thermal resilience.