Development of a new methodology for low energy buildings design ; Développement d'une méthodologie de conception de bâtiments à basse consommation d'énergie

The building sector represents the most energy consuming sector in France with 43% of final energy consumption and 25% of greenhouse gases emission. Thus, efforts should be taken to promote new buildings construction and existent buildings thermal renovation satisfying low energy building criterions. The main target of this work is to set up a methodology to carry out parametrical studies during the design process of a low energy building. The methodology consists of using numerical simulation tools and the design of experiments method (DOE) to develop polynomial models to evaluate the energy efficiency and summer thermal comfort of buildings. The polynomial models simplify parametrical studies by replacing numerical simulation tools to find out solutions to get to low energy buildings. The methodology is used to improve the energy efficiency of a small typical French office building, called Beethoven, to achieve a low energy building suitable for the French climate condition. The first chapter presents the state of art of low energy buildings. The state of art work deals with low energy buildings labels and projects realization, as well as HVAC systems and building envelope concepts. The second chapter treats with numerical models development in the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment and its integration in the SIMBAD models library. These models are useful to set up the methodology. A few studies carried out using the developed models to evaluate low energy buildings and HVAC systems performance, are also presented. The third chapter deals with the presentation of the office building characteristics and the underlying principles of the design of experiments method. The thermal characteristics of the office building are chosen according to the French thermal regulation guidelines. These characteristics are considered as a reference configuration to evaluate the energy efficiency improvements of the low energy office building. The energy efficiency of the office building for the reference configuration is evaluated with ...