Lowering Inside Temperature of Buildings by Automatic Optimum Generation

LOWERING INSIDE TEMPERATURE OF BUILDINGS BY

AUTOMATIC OPTIMUM GENERATION

Dirk Rilling, Ammar Al-Shalabi and Sree Ram A/L Apana Nayaranan

Multimedia University, Melaka Campus, Faculty of Engineering And Technology, Melaka, Malaysia
dirk.rilling@mmu.edu.my
ammar@faho.rwth-aachen.de

ABSTRACT: Inside temperature of buildings in Malaysia is greatly determined by local weather

conditions, i.e. the sun. For this paper the influence of the environment on inside temperature was
studied and also how an autonomous optimisation can help to find to meet the objective of lower
inside temperature, hence cooling load. Design parameters used are building orientation and
different insulation setups. Research was conducted on a standard Malaysian terrace house
model arranged in array form. EnergyPlus is set to work alongside with GenOpt in order to carry
out simulations and optimisations. The terrace house is designed with either the standard materials,
which are normally used in residential construction, and a highly energy efficient building material,
i.e aerated concrete block. The key is to find the ideal orientation that has lower inside temperatures.
Subsequently, the optimisation shows the relationship between building materials, orientation,
and inside temperature. The optimization started from viewing the lowest temperatures to optimized
orientations and finally selecting the orientation, which is feasible throughout the year. Every
month requires different orientation setting to suit the climate change, thus it is not possible to
have a house built for multiple orientations. It is found that aligning the row of terrace houses at
an orientation of 137.5º followed by 222.5º off North for the given model is best and will improve
thermal comfort in sense of lower inside temperature throughout the year for both insulation
setups. The average inside temperature is found to be 27.3 ºC and 25.9 ºC for standard Malaysian
and highly efficient building materials, respectively. This renders to 0.153 kWh lower additional
need of auxiliary electrical power based on a comfort neutral temperature of 26 ºC per design day.
Keywords: Building Orientation, Thermal Optimisation, Tropical Climate, Design, Simulation

1. INTRODUCTION

The global demand for improvement in building designs has significantly encouraged many researchers
and students to pick up the challenge to contribute new design technologies to the developers. Some
of the many improvements needed come from performance consideration such as energy, comfort,
cost, environment impacts, etc. Energy efficiency has mostly been limited to South Korea, Japan,
Singapore and Australia (GOLDSEA, 2006). Countries such as Malaysia are very new to design
concepts where proper simulation and optimization on a building is done before hand. Developers
generally concentrate on other aspects including cost.
Currently, Malaysia is growing at a high-speed pace and every developer is competing for a
share. The thought of constructing an optimized building has never been taken into consideration as
a result of the high costs involved. However, studies have shown to build high efficient building
would not cost more than 10% of conventional buildings construction and this highly depends on the
assertiveness of the design (DOE, 2006).

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The successful application of simulation and optimization tools for building design problems is
shown through works of Wright (Wright, 2002) and Gustafsson (Gustafsson, 2000). It is a multi-
dimensional solution space with few objectives or constraints and they do not have the same physical
meaning.
The energy analysis done for a typical Malaysian terrace house in order to get the thermal
behavior by help of EnergyPlus software and local weather data of Kuala Lumpur (DOE, 2007).
Based on the results and experiences of earlier research findings which have been published (Rilling
2007, Rilling, 2008), the aim of this research is to figure out how autonomous optimization approach
can be utilized in oder to find points of thermal comfort with given design by computer based tools.
Hence, the main focus was on building fabric. Although the model is zoned according to different
usage, user pattern was not further investigated. As objective function, the orientation of the the
terrace house array is chosen. In addition, the aim is to show how to proceed with the objective
using one-objective optimization algorithm. The thermal comfort is represented by inside temperature
of center block of the terrace house array. Lower inside temperature leads to lower utilization of
auxiliary energy for air-conditioning and hence to lower emission of pollutants on the energy production
side.

2. METHODS

For the project purpose to optimize the terrace house arrangement, the software package EnergyPlus
is connected to generic optimization program GenOpt.
EnergyPlus (or E+) is a building energy simulation program for modeling building heating, cooling,
lighting, ventilating, and other energy flows (DOE, 2002). It is based on the most popular features
and capabilities of BLAST (Building Loads Analysis and System Thermodynamics) (Building Systems
Laboratory, 1999) and DOE-2 (Crawley, 2005). E+ provides the simulation engine but only
rudimentary graphical user interface features. DesignBuilder software fills this gap with an easy-to-
use solid modeler, which allows house and building models to be easily assembled in 3-D space by
providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for easy interaction (DBS 2008). The model then is
thermally zoned and transferred to the E+ program to do the simulation part; the results are displayed
and evaluated again in DesignBuilder. Data communication between DesignBuilder and E+ is based
on the IDF/IFC-files-standard (Bazjanac, 1999).
GenOpt as generic optimization program must be connected to other simulation program such
as SPARK, E+ or TRNSYS, in order to conduct an optimization of parameters from simulation
programs (Wetter, 2001). In GenOpt this is done by help of one-parametric and multi-parametric
optimization (Wetter, 2003).
The workflow in order to obtain optimized results regarding thermal comfort is done usually in a
manual way. Parameters are changed, the model simulated and the result evaluated in order to cut
down the dimension of solution space. The aim is to eventually arrive at a small, lower-dimensional
solution space, where the predicted results are within set limits. By coupling E+ and GenOpt, this is
transferred into a simulation-optimization approach where the result is found autonomously. Other
authors have came up with approaches of evolutionary programming (Fong, 2006), or using neuro-

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fuzzy algorithms (Lu, 2005) in order to solve energy optimization problems. GenOpt is chosen for
this project because it is developed for optimization of objective function from external simulation
programs, such as SPARK, E+ or TRNSYS.

2.1 Description of Case Study Building

The reference type of house design for this research is chosen according to data of the Valuation &
Property Services Department of Malaysia (Finance Ministry of Malaysia, 2005). It states that the
terrace house holds the biggest fraction of both existing supply and newly planned supply or residential
units in Malaysia.
The floor plan of a single storey terrace house used in this project was obtained online (iProperty,
2003). The living space is 120 m2 and the same for all calculations, with a height between floors of
2.5 m. The window ratio is 22% at the front side and 12% at the rear side of the unit, with an air
exchange rate of 0.5 ACH. For the simulation one unit is modeled, thermally zoned and then arranged
to an array in a way often seen in new land developing projects (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1: Floor Plan for Terrace House (left) and thermal zones

For this type of housing design, which is kept the same for all simulation, two material setups
have been chosen. One which is typical and can be found in almost every terrace house, hence
called standard Malaysian. The other which is based on application of a highly energy-efficient
residential building, the so-called Cooltek house, located in the Tiara Melaka Golf and Country Club
(see Figure 3).
Its insulated walls are made of aerated concrete blocks and extra insulated floors, and double
glazing. The differences in setup can be seen in Table 1.

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Figure 2: Visualisation of the Terrace House Array with North Point in DesignBuilder.

Figure 3: The Cooltek House

Table 1: Material data for standard Malaysian and Cooltek setup (continues on next page)

Type Thickness/m U-Value/W/m2K

Malaysian Wall
Outermost layer: Concrete 0.01
Brickwork 0.12
Innermost layer: Concrete 0.01 2.962
Cooltek Wall
Outermost layer: External rendering 0.01
Aerated concrete slab 0.25
Innermost layer: Plaster (lightweight) 0.01 0.549
Malaysian/Un-insulated Roof
Outermost layer: Clay tiles 0.025
Air gap 0.02
Innermost layer: Roofing felt 0.025 2.79
Cooltek Roof
Outermost layer: Zinc-Aluminum 0.0005
Innermost layer Steel 0.0048 6.364
Malaysian Window
Single-glazed clear 6.121
Cooltek Window
Double-Glazed clear 6 mm + Ar 1.499

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Objective is to find the orientation that contributes to lowest inside temperature in the terrace
house array for two different material setups. Hence, analysis for this research was done on the
house in the center of the array, block 6 (see Figure 2), because the result of the simulation can be
transferred easily to other ‘center’ units, whereas both ends of the array are considered similar to
semi-detached houses and hence not practical. It is noticed that highest heat transfer occurs at the
end units (units 1 and 11) due to larger side surface area relative to the front or rear side of the
block. For both end blocks orientation around 0° off North would be best to avoid direct sun light.
Figure 4 shows this effect: the black line arrow shows the sun moving from East to West and the the
thick lines at front and rear encircle the area of contact with the sun. Compromising and placing the
array at orientation of 0° would generally cause higher temperature throughout the row of houses
because the area which faces the sunlight is the entire row. For this reason, it’s not possible to
compromise the orientation for the end units. It can be concluded for this arrangement that
improvement of end units design regarding their cooling load should rather be done by additional
thermal insulation or changes in design. However, this is not the scope of this research.

Figure 4: Sunrise and sunset pattern over the row of terrace house aligned at 0º & 90º

2.2 Forming the Objective Function

In order to determine the optimal values of parameters, it is necessary to define the objective
function. In this case to get as close as possible to the comfort level expressed as inside air
temperature, which can be easily obtained from EnergyPlus?
GenOpt allows that only the first function defined in the initial file can be the objective function
to be minimized or maximized. The range of the values for optimized parameter is defined in the

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command file (Wetter 2003). In a next step, the initial file is set to seek optimal orientation points.
This is the file GenOpt is using for the optimization process. Once GenOpt is loaded, this file is used
in the building simulation program EnergyPlus. GenOpt automatically creates new input files, calls
EnergyPlus comparing the template file and the building file, replacing the numerical values at the
set parameters and runs the simulation. This process is repeated until a minimized objective value is
found, like shown in Figure 5. Based on the found inside air temperature in the center block, the
orientation of the whole array is adjusted to the value range set in the command file.

Figure 5: Interface between GenOpt and the simulation program

3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Figure 6 shows the lowest inside temperatures for annual pattern for the above-described setups,
standard Malaysian and Cooltek. Optimization was done on first of every month. Temperature
fluctuations are mainly due to effects of sun movement. For weather data of Kuala Lumpur it was
evident that temperature differs to a maximum of 2 K.
Due to equinox occurring in late March and September, temperature at this month is recorded
highest for both standard Malaysian and Cooltek, at 28.3 ºC and 26.5 ºC respectively. Summer and
winter solstices occurs during June 21st and December 21st. This is during the time the sun moves
23.5 towards North or South from the equatorial belt. Therefore lowest temperatures are seen
during that time. Due to the location of Malaysia slightly away from the equatorial belt the effects
however are felt not directly during this time but slightly later in the following months. Hence, the
lowest temperatures are felt during January and July.

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Figure 6: The lowest annual temperature points regardless of the orientation of each month
and with standard Malaysian and Cooltek setup; A/C off.

The optimizations for the lowest temperature profiles in Figure 6 were not done on a weekly or
monthly basis because it is an optimization process to find lowest inside temperatures on annual
basis. A single day simulation and optimization would lead to find lowest temperature in that particular
day of that month. Whereas doing a weekly and monthly optimization would give almost no variation
or fluctuation in temperature. The temperatures found with each simulation cycle are with air
conditioning set to OFF to easily point out the influences of orientation to inside temperature.
It is noticed over the year that the Cooltek setup leads to higher comfort level, i.e. lower inside
temperature, with a difference up to ∆θinside = 1.2 K compared to standard Malaysian, based on the
higher insulation standard. The lowest inside temperature for Cooltek was found to be 24.9 °C,
compared to 26.1 °C for standard Malaysian in month November. Compared the annual average
inside temperature: 25.8 °C and 27.4 °C for Cooltek and standard Malaysian, respectively, and its
deviation shows that Cooltek setup has not only lower inside temperature but also provides least
fluctuation of it by 1.8%.
The next step was to find out at what orientation lowest inside temperature for the terrace
house array may be found. Figure 7 shows optimized orientation points (angle in degree off North)
for standard Malaysian setup over a year. Optimized orientation is the way the row of terrace house
should be aligned. Placing this array of house in one of these optimized orientations will lead to
increased thermal comfort.

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Figure 7: Optimized orientation points at lowest inside temperatures using standard Malaysian setup

It is seen that orientation points overlap from one month to another. In January for example four
optimized orientations were found. During the first and the last quarter, most optimized orientations
are seen in range of 220º to 310º, for the rest of the year orientations are within 50º to 140º. The
optimization shows that center block avoids sunrays as much as possible in order to keep inside
temperature low, as the sun moves from equinox to solstices. Only two optimized orientation are
found to have the same orientation throughout the year, which are 137.5º and 222.5º. Both these
orientations do not render to lowest inside temperatures but are better choice whereas other points
would only give lower inside temperatures for certain months. For example, orientation points for
April at 84.9º, 92.64º and 105.04º may have lower temperatures compared to 137.5º and 222.5º but
these points are not an ideal choice as it does not have a common orientation throughout the year.
Figure 8 show that Cooltek setup was found to have the same annual orientation pattern 137.5º
and 222.5º. This indicates that the design, the architecture, is the determining factor for this type of
residential building. By comparing the Cooltek and the standard Malaysian setup it is clear that most
of the orientation points are about the same.
The following figure compares the optimal values obtained over the period of optimization. The
only two ideal values; 137.5º and 222.49º for both the materials used are plotted. Figure 9 shows the
comparison for both setups and both orientations. It clearly shows the both setups follow the same
pattern throughout the year with an inside temperature difference of ∆θinside ≈ 2 K.

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Figure 8: Optimized orientation points at lowest temperatures for Cooltek setup

Figure 9: Comparison between two best orientations, 137.5º and 222.5º,

and inside temperatures for standard Malaysian and Cooltek setup

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Both setups are observed to rise and fall similarly throughout the year. During the 1st quarter
and the last month, 222.5º has noted lower inside temperatures for both the materials. Following up
the other months, April till November, orientation 137.5º proves to have lower temperatures. By
comparing the number of months for a lower inside temperature sets 137.5º as the best choice. The
standard deviation and the coefficient of variation for both setups at 137.5º are lower compared to
222.5º. However, the difference for both orientations is only marginal. To conclude, the best-optimized
orientation is the Cooltek at 137.5º, with an average inside temperature of 25.9 ºC and subsequently
the standard Malaysian setup at 137.5º with average inside temperature of 27.3 ºC.

4. CONCLUSION

This project focuses on the utilization of automated optimization approach in order to lower the
inside temperature of a terrace house. During research one terrace house design with two different
insulation setups was used. By help of simulation-optimization process, orientations were found
which lead to lowest inside temperature. This was done for the geographical location of Malaysia.
A normal workflow for getting knowledge about thermal building performance engineers have
to adjust parameters of building fabric or site characteristic in order to get optimized results. For the
indicated building orientation, normally 45º steps would be chosen and to see whether to find optimized
results within one turn, i.e. 360º. This is time consuming and results may not be revealed by just
manual adjustments, like shown in (Rilling, 2007). With the used model simulation-optimization time
was half compared with a manual approach and, as the process implies, optimized orientations were
found. Hence the approach saved compute and operator (engineer) time which is an asset in order
∆θ to stay competitive.
The influence of orientation on cooling load, i.e. inside temperature was shown. Based on the
used model and the insulation setups a reduction of inside temperature of approximately 2 K was
found. To show the effect on lowering cooling load the found inside temperature in the model for
both setups is referred to the neutral temperature of comfort level, θn. Hamdan (Hamdan et al.,
2007) has made and extensive study in comparing the comfort level in Malaysia and concludes
that neutral temperature is at θn = 26 ºC. With the width of the comfort zone taken to be 5º C
(Szokolay, 2004), thermal comfort temperatures extend approximately about 2.5º C above and
below the neutral temperature. Both setups at both orientations a well within this comfort zone
and the Cooltek setup slightly below θn. If we assume this to be a wanted state of comfort,
additional energy has to be utilized to bring the standard Malaysian setup to this level. For the unit
investigated this would render to ∆E = 545 kJ = 0.153 kWh per day. Extrapolated to a whole
developing site or the whole nation it certainly makes an impact. The positive outcome from
cooling load reduction is decreased energy usage in order to reach comfort level in the used
building model. This leads to less emission of CO2, amongst others, on the production side. Burning
fossil fuels like crude oil and natural gas liquids predominantly does the supply of electrical energy
in Malaysia (EarthTrends, 2003). With an assumed power plant efficient of η = 0.4 (AES, 2005;
Herrmann, 2005), the energy content of crude oil eOil = 11.63 kWh/kgOil, and the emission factor
for CO2 of crude oil E* = 0.27 kgCO2/kWhOil (Thames Valley Energy, 2006), the savings sum up
to 1066 kgOil and 3350 kgCO2, respectively, for a site of 100 units (whereas only the eight middle
units are acknowledged) and for one year.

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Where this has positive impact on the environment, stakeholders are more interested in the cost
side. In the end it is always left to the negotiations whether lower initial cost but a steeper slope of
cost function during building operation or higher initial cost but much lower slope bears advantage on
the long run. Very likely the cost for energy is rising over the time, so the latter is more reasonable
to choose. It has to kept also in mind that it may take up to two years of fine tuning until a building
reaches it maximum optimization potential during operation.
Designing a building should be done in a holistic approach. Building simulation as a tool can
show how different sub systems interact with each other and hence how the ecologic and economic
footprint will be. It should be stated that the result a closely bound to the given design hence the
results show that in the architecture of the house itself lays a higher potential of energy and thus cost
saving is incorporated. This is especially important since not always an optimized orientation can be
applied based in given site characteristics.
Further research will be done on multi-dimensional optimization in order to find further insight
about building characteristics.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors would like to thank Mrs. Stephanie Bacon and Mr. Harry Boswell for sharing their
experience with design and operation of their home, the Cooltek house. Additional thanks goes to
netWORKED IDEE Building Consultants Sdn. Bhd. for their technological support and feedback.

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