DIN EN ISO 13791

Introduction

The standard includes 3 basic test cases and one composite test case, which are briefly summarized below.

The basic test cases are very suitable for testing basic functions of a thermal building simulation. The composite test case lacks intermediate results to determine the causes of deviations between calculation results and simulation results. It is not documented with which model or numerical method was used to generate the reference results in the dynamic test case. Thus, the test case is not suitable to check the correctness of a certain model implementation (if an error corridor is accepted, numerical/model errors may remain undetected).

Test Cases

Heat conduction through opaque elements

Here, a cube of 1 m edge length with a changing construction is subjected to a climatic jump of the outside temperature from 20 °C to 30 °C within one hour per test case. The indoor air temperature is to be calculated and is compared with reference values at different times.

Internal heat exchange through long-wave radiation

In radiation exchange, the test objects are cuboids with different dimensions. A heat flux of 100 W/m2 is emitted at an inner surface. The outside temperatures of the wall are 20 °C or 30 >°C (wall with heat emission). The evaluation criterion is the indoor air temperature at different times.

Determination of heat transfer by short-wave radiation – Shading calculation

For different geometries of external shading, the ratio of the area irradiated by the sun to the total area is to be calculated for a window area for different altitude and azimuth angles. Reference results are given for given angles and shading geometries.

Composite test

Here, two test rooms with different proportions of glazing are considered. A matrix of variants is created for these two rooms with three different ventilation scenarios and design setups. The comparison criterion is the operative temperature in the room. The rooms are exposed to an outdoor climate with radiation and temperature response as well as a load profile due to internal loads.