Building Energy Simulation for Nearly Zero Energy Retrofit Design: The Model Calibration

Building energy simulation is an effective tool to design retrofit and management interventions, provided that the simulation model is carefully calibrated. As a first step towards the development of guidelines for using dynamic simulation for the design of retrofit interventions aiming at the nZEB target, in the present study a calibration procedure, consisting in tuning the building walls model first, is demonstrated. Therefore, starting from a real building case study, the walls model is created in parallel within different building simulation environments, namely EnergyPlus, IDA ICE and OpenBPS. The impact of the simulation tool and of the calibration procedure on the model predictions is thus investigated and discussed