Abstract
1. Introduction
The factors that influence the heat gainof a building including building envelope
efficiency design, occupancy behavior, and, most ofall, the local climate. Therefore, before
understanding the energy consumption of a building by simulation, local meteorological data
should be firstly well prepared so as to actually reflect the energy use. The objective of this
research is to establish typical meteorological years (TMY3) for the use in building dynamic
simulation. Hourly observed weather data from 1990 to 2012 of eight locations, Taipei,
Hsingchu, Taichung, Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Hualian, and Taitong, were prepared to
construct TMY3 by means of internationally recognized standard method.
2. Methodology
The research adopted Sandia Method developed from National Renewable Energy
Laboratory of United States (NREL) as standard method for constructing TMY3. The
processes firstly start with rearrangement,filling missing data, and omitting unreasonable
records from the raw weather data recorded from Central Weather Bureau. As TMY3 is an
hypothetical weather year that its constitutional individual months would not necessarily
comes from the same year. Therefore, in order to seek for the most representative months that
have the least deviation from the long-term weather, concepts of candidate months were
adopted. The month that have the top five least deviation are considered as candidate months.
Statistical method of root mean square error (RMSE) was used to test each candidate month’s
deviation against their long-term weather. The one that has the least RMSE was considered as
chosen months.
3. Results
The research adopted internationally recognized method in developing TMY3. As a result,
the establish TMY3s are capable of comparing toother world’s TMY3 data. By comparing the
newly constructed TMY3 with Taiwan’s historical AWY and TMY2, the TMY3s are more
representative against their corresponding local weather. For an office building located in
Taipei as an example, the annual cooling energy consumption were 120.9, 121.9, and 122.3
(KWh/m2), when simulated with the meteorological years AWY, TMY2, and TMY3,
accordingly. It is observed that there is 1.9% increase in cooling energy use.
Furthermore, in the study of indoor thermal comfort change of a natural ventilated house,
it is found that the frequency of discomforthours is gradually increased. There are 18.3%,
23.5%, and 26.0% opportunity to fall behind the thermal comfort range, respectively. While
considering the discomfort severity, there are 53% increase as simulated with TMY3 in
comparison with the case simulated with AWY. It indicates that although the indoor
overheating hours does not have a significant increase through these year period, the degree
of thermal discomfort is severely increased. The research also studied the efficiency of some
proposed adaptive strategies that could be adopted for residential buildings.
This project comes to the immediate and long-term strategies.
For immediate strategies:
1. The developed TMY3s are recommended to be announced publically for utilization.
2. It is suggested that future weather dataare mandatory fundamentals for studying the
climatic impact on building energy use and the efficiency of various adaptation
strategies. Further research on the typical meteorological data that reflects the climate
change within a century future are highly recommended.