A novel energy simulation approach for thermal design of buildings equipped with radiative panels using inverse methodology

•Radiative panels can work as efficient building heating equipment.•Using numerical simulation leads to improve precision of building load calculation.•Using inverse analysis leads to augment computational precision in building design.•It seems necessary to check accuracy of inverse simulation via sensitivity analysis.

The purpose of this research is to present a novel approach to estimate thermal design parameters with unknown values in a building equipped with radiative panels with the use of inverse methodology. A direct model is selected to analyze thermal behavior of building components in order to determine indoor temperature field using direct numerical modeling. Using inverse analysis, three thermal design parameters with unknown values, such as conductivity, internal and external convection and total heat transfer coefficients, are estimated using Levenberg–Marquardt and conjugate gradient methods with the knowledge of temperature field resulted from direct modeling. To illustrate the sufficiency of inverse technique, the results of both noisy and non-noisy estimations are presented using sensitivity analysis. To verify the accuracy of the present study, the results of inverse analysis are compared with those of numerical simulation presented in the literature, which indicates a good agreement between numerical and inverse solutions. It is shown that inverse analysis can be used as an applicable approach to increase computational precision in building thermal design phase.