Occupants behavior influence on buildings energy performance. Investigations in residential and office buildings

Abstract

The general objective of the research was to evaluate the main factors affecting the energy performance of buildings by considering both physical and occupancy variables. The research had two different approaches, one of them was regarding occupant behavior related to energy consumption in residential buildings and the other focused on the office buildings. The investigations were conducted by means of data collection and statistical analyses in existing residential buildings. Furthermore, different procedures for obtaining occupancy profiles were applied. Finally, a case of design and modeling of Nearly Zero Energy Buildings was developed in order to study the influence of occupancy in high efficient energy buildings. The results showed that different approaches of modeling occupancy can lead to considerable variations in building energy performance. In office buildings, the detection of occupancy was obtained by an experimental approach. First of all, the state of the art regarding the sensors and devices used for measuring and monitoring indoor parameters was defined. Successively, an experimental setup was created in an office of the University of Calabria in order to collect data on occupancy and energy consumption by means of sensors and manual observations. The criterion of sensor fusion was adopted. Data were processed by using different statistical techniques: clustering analysis, descriptive and stochastic elaborations. The results were models that can be used either to describe or predict occupancy profiles. Structure of this work The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is a general introduction titled Occupant behavior in buildings, regarding occupant behavior and its relationship to the energy consumption in residential buildings, office buildings, and low energy buildings. At the end of this chapter a brief description of occupant behavior and energy simulation in buildings is presented. In the second chapter, Building occupancy is presented with a description concerning the occupancy sensing techniques used and general classification following different approaches. Residential buildings is the title of the third chapter in which we attempt to describe the objectives and main findings of three investigations regarding residential buildings and occupancy profiles definition by means of the development of cases of study. The title of the fourth chapter is Office buildings: the experimental study. It consists of the description of the experimental study realized at the University of Calabria in an office building. A description of the sensors and the monitored data were presented. The Office buildings: data analysis is the fifth chapter of the thesis, with the different approaches used to analyze experimental data. It begins with the statistical analysis and ends with the results of the modeling based on indoor environment measurements. The General conclusions is the last chapter of the thesis, with a review and discussion of the key contributions of this research work