Designing a 24-hour perturbation method for the estimation of a building heat transfer coefficient

• Published in: Journal of physics. Conference series 2021-11, Vol.2069 (1), p.12145
• Main Authors: Juricic, S, Rouchier, S, Goffart, J
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1742-6588; 1742-6596
• DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/2069/1/012145

Verification of the actual thermal performance of a building envelope after renovation is likely to become a useful key for performance contracting in the frame of heavy retrofit operations in buildings. Some existing methods such as the co-heating method, use on-site measurements to estimate the Heat Transfer Coefficient, or its inverse the overall thermal resistance. Although reliable and accurate, they need several days to several weeks of undisturbed measurements which can be rather inconvenient for building occupants and quite expensive in terms of operational costs. This paper investigates perturbation methods to design a 24-h heat input signal that would ensure an accuracy similar to or better than other perturbation methods to estimate an overall thermal resistance of the building envelope. The paper first studies 256 different squared heating signals in a numerical methodology to determine common characteristics of high-scoring 24-h signals. An experimental campaign in a wooden-framed house tested one of the high-scoring signals. The experimental results showed estimation errors higher than expected but consistent with the literature.