Development of an automatic calibration method of a VRF energy model for the design of energy efficient buildings

The application of whole-building energy simulation in the design and operation of buildings is limited because there are discrepancies between the actual energy consumption and the predictions obtained from energy simulation. A newly developed automatic calibration method for the variable refrigerant flow energy model, which aims to reduce the errors between simulated and measured energy consumption, has been introduced. The software that implements this method was developed for the wide use of calibrated simulations in the design of sustainable buildings. The automatic calibration method consists of parameter selection and determining boundary conditions, automatic simulation using Latin hypercube sampling, and selecting the energy models that meet the criteria for normalized mean biased error values. The developed software has been used to calibrate an energy model for a typical mid-sized office building in Korea. Comparisons between the measured energy consumption and the outcomes predicted by the software confirm that the developed calibration method can generate calibrated energy models that satisfy the criteria and the significance level of a paired t-test.