Microclimatic coupling as a solution to improve building energy simulation in an urban context

To streamline the design of the energy efficient buildings, appropriate tools are needed to assess their energy performance taking into account the microclimatic context.Numerical simulation seems to be the most suitable issue, but none tool is dedicate to the direct evaluation of the microclimate influence on the building energy consumption. A complete solution could be to use both CFD and thermoradiative simulation tools complementary with the coupling technique perspective. This paper presents both a developed CFD–thermoradiative coupled simulation tool and a typical application on an urban fragment.The results lead to two kind of observations:
• Integration of the thermal model of a building in the microclimatic simulation platform enable a quantitative evaluation of the building energy demand regarding different urban design scenarii (e.g. mineralized vs vegetated).
• Different physical phenomena do not contribute as much in the energy balance and it is important to compute precisely each one to obtain the small scale microclimatic influence.