A World Class Energy Efficient University Building by Danish 2020 Standards

The paper provides an overview of the OU44 building as a highly energy efficient teaching building at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. The 8500m2 3-storey building was designed to meet the 2020 buildings energy class consuming only 42 kWh/m2, marking it at the top of energy efficient public buildings in the world. As a case study under the international research project COORDICY, the goal of OU44 is to function as a living lab building for research in energy informatics and occupancy behavior, aiming to improve the energy efficiency of public buildings, with full capability to monitor, manage and control the building operation. The building is equipped with energy efficient technologies including, ventilation units with heat recovery, LED lights, underfloor heating, PV modules, in addition to heating, lighting and electricity consumption sub-meters, and temperature, humidity, CO2, Lux and PIR sensors on the room level. Using collected data, the building performance in the first year of operation is reported in this paper, showing that the building is in agreement with the expected design numbers consuming about 41.45 kWh/m2. In addition, a modeling and simulation methodology is developed and implemented in the OU44 Building case to simulate the building energy performance. Employing a weather file updated for local conditions and a camera-based generated occupancy schedule, the preliminary building performance simulation results are presented and compared to the actual data. It was shown that the dynamic EnergyPlus model allows better prediction of the building energy performance compared to the Danish building certification tool BE10. As a living lab, the OU44 energy model developed is intended to be used for continuous monitoring and optimizing the performance on a daily basis to ensure that the building is performing as expected, forming a backbone for the fault detection and diagnostics work within the COORDICY project.