Simplified and Fully Detailed Dynamic Building Energy Simulation Tools Compared to Monitored Data for a Single-Family NZEB House

Building energy automation and control strategies have recently been applied to improve the energy performance of the building and to exploit the integration of the build ing envelope, HVAC and RES. To optimise their applica tion, reliable data on the dynamic energy behaviour of the building should be available possibly from monitoring, but also from simulation at the design stage. This paper compares the results of two building perfor mance simulation tools: TRNSYS, which implements a fully detailed model and software implementing a simpli fied model according to the EN ISO 52016-1 standard. We are interested in investigating the potential of the EN ISO 52016-1 model to capture the dynamic behaviour of the building. A NZEB single-family house in Northern Italy, where the thermal loads are met by a domestic air han dling unit (AHU) with heat recovery was taken as a case study. The TRNSYS model is calibrated using data availa ble from the 15-minute monitoring of the indoor/outdoor temperatures, the electrical energy consumption and the source/sink temperatures of the heat pump, and then com pared with the result of the standard model in terms of both monthly thermal energy demand and hourly heating demand. The simplified model overestimates the annual heating demand compared to the detained model, but is able to capture the daily maximum both in terms of value and temporal cadence.