Field test of a Thermal Active Building System (TABS) in an office building in Denmark

An increasing attention has been addressed in the last years to the assessment, at the same time, of energy performances and indoor environmental quality in buildings. Focusing on thermal comfort recent international standards as ISOEN7730 and EN15251 introduce criteria for using categories in the indoor environmental assessment of a building. At the same time, also use of low temperature heating and high temperature cooling systems in non-residential buildings has increased, due to the energy efficiency and the economical cooling and heating performance of this kind of plants. This paper presents an experimental study in an office building in Denmark where cooling in summer is provided by thermally activated building systems (TABS). Indoor climate quality evaluation, cooling system performance and energy consumption for a specific room were analyzed with different levels of internal gains. The experiments were carried out monitoring air and operative temperature, relative humidity and CO2 levels in the room where internal heat gains from people where controlled and simulated by heated dummies positioned at the same workstations used by employees during the workdays. Supply and return water temperature in the pipes of the hydronic system, and energy consumption of the chillers were monitored. The performance of this test room was also analyzed by the dynamic building simulation tool Energy Plus. The paper includes a comparison between experimental collected data and simulation results. Besides the paper show example on how to present data from long-term measurements or simulation results.