Estimation and optimisation of buildings' thermal load using LiDAR data

Publication date: 15 January 2018
Source:Building and Environment, Volume 128
Author(s): Marko Bizjak, Borut Žalik, Gorazd Štumberger, Niko Lukač
With the growing urbanization and environmental concerns over buildings' energy consumption and carbon footprint, the demand for energy-efficient building design is greater than ever. This paper addresses these concerns by presenting a novel method for estimating and optimising the thermal load (i.e. total energy load for heating and cooling) of a building within a real environment, provided by high-resolution LiDAR data, while considering long-term climatological parameters, estimated direct and anisotropic diffuse irradiance, shadowing from surroundings, and terrain topography. In the optimisation part of the method, the building's design is optimised regarding the estimated thermal load. The estimation was validated with the well-established EnergyPlus software. In experiments, a rectangular building's design was optimised on a flat and urban dataset. The effect of a building's design parameters on thermal load was inspected as well. On average, the proposed method improved a building's net heat gain by over 103 kWh/m² and reduced its thermal load by 234.18 kWh/m² when compared with the initial building design.