Christoph van Treeck

• Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil.
• Managing Director at RWTH Aachen University

This supplementary report extends the results of the conference paper "Indoor spatial distribution of CO₂ and effect of sensor location on the performance of data-driven presence detection in a naturally ventilated school building". It provides additional data, detailed simulation settings, and high-resolution visualizations to enhance reproducibil...

Der Leitfaden liefert fundiertes Hintergrundwissen, wertvolle Praxistipps und zeigt Sanierungsbeispiele. Darauf aufbauend haben die Autoren ein Schema entwickelt, mit dem Klassenräume möglichst einfach und schnell nach dem Baukastenprinzip saniert werden können, ohne den Überblick über alle Raumfaktoren zu verlieren.

This study presents CityDPC, a Python library for geometric computations on CityGML and CityJSON datasets, merging features from tools such as CityATB. It supports loading, analyzing, validating, and manipulating 3D city model datasets, aiming to enhance Python applications for urban building stock analyses. It introduces a shared building class to...

This paper introduces three novel approaches to size geothermal energy piles in a MILP, offering fresh perspectives and potential solutions. The research overlooks MILP models that incorporate the sizing of a geothermal borefield. Therefore, this paper presents a new model utilizing a g-function model to regulate the power limits. Geothermal energy...

This study addresses neighborhood-level sustainability in urban development as a critical lever in Germany’s energy transition goals. It explores identifying reference districts through Geographic Information System (GIS)-based machine learning and public data, utilizing clustering methods to analyze spatial and socio-infrastructural metrics. The m...

Accurate occupancy information helps to improve building energy efficiency and occupant comfort. Occupancy detection methods based on CO2 sensors have received attention due to their low cost and low intrusiveness. In naturally ventilated buildings, the accuracy of CO2-based occupancy detection is generally low in related studies due to the complex...

Building energy system management is critical for resource-saving approaches amid climate change-driven energy transitions. This paper presents a digital twin toolchain leveraging modern technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR). The toolchain automates t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in working from home worldwide, making the work-from-home (WFH) setting a crucial context for studying the influence of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) on workers’ well-being and productivity. A narrative and visual synthesis of 41 research articles on IEQ in WFH settings was conducted to i...

Background: Rising greenhouse gas concentrations, primarily carbon dioxide, are raising global temperatures. Germany aims to reduce emissions by 95 \% by 2045 compared to 1990 under the Climate Change Act 2021. This paper introduces two methodologies to determine hourly German electricity system values for this decarbonization period: crucial for l...

Large discrepancies can occur between building energy performance simulation (BEPS) outputs and reference data. Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses are performed to discover the significant contributions of each input parameter to these discrepancies. Variance-based sensitivity analyses typically require many stochastic simulations, which is compu...

Future weather scenarios significantly affect indoor thermal comfort, influencing people’s well-being and productivity at work. Thus, future weather scenarios should be considered in the design phase to improve a building’s climate change resilience for new constructions as well as renovations in building stock. As thermal comfort is highly influen...

Studies show that people can tolerate elevated temperatures in the presence of appreciable air movement (e.g., from using ceiling fans). This minimises the use of air-conditioners and extends their tset (tset), resulting in energy savings in space cooling. However, there is little empirical evidence on the energy savings from using ceiling fans wit...

District-level modeling and simulation can help optimize energy flows and identify energy-saving opportunities. This paper compares various existing Matlab-based libraries and toolboxes for modeling and simulating dynamic building performance systems. The paper presents a reduced-order model based on the VDI 6007 guideline, utilizing an electrical...

Climate neutrality goals in the building sector require a large-scale estimation of environmental impacts for various stakeholders. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a viable method for this purpose. However, its high granularity, and subsequent data requirements and effort, hinder its propagation, and potential employment of Machine Learning (ML) app...

This paper reports findings from a two-wave intervention study to monitor and improve natural ventilation in classrooms. Already installed single CO2 traffic lights were evaluated in terms of their representativity. Measurements took place during winter and the early summer in three classrooms of a middle school in Düren, Germany. During the second...

Background. Building performance can be assessed using a wide array of performance metrics, including daylight performance, occupant comfort, wellbeing and building energy consumption. Depending on which performance metric is used to support design decision making, the design outcome may vary greatly. The challenges of evaluating compromises betwee...

Especially since Covid-19, indoor environmental quality (IEQ) has become a focus of attention again. In addition to thermal comfort, indoor air quality (IAQ), lighting conditions, and noise greatly influence people's satisfaction and performance. In this paper, a modular monitoring system based on ESP32 microcontroller and Raspberry Pi was develope...

Since the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, CO2 as an indicator of indoor air quality and infection risk has gained attention and serves as a proxy for the air exchange rate. Based on CO2 measurements, calculations to estimate and predict potential infection risks have been developed. This paper describes the development, construction, and calibrati...

This paper introduces the equivalent contact temperature (ECT) model for local thermal comfort assessment in contact areas for non-uniform environmental conditions. It aims to complete the comfort evaluation scheme of the equivalent temperature approach included in ISO 14505-2 by the contact areas back and buttocks that are currently neglected in t...

This study explores the applicability of data augmentation techniques for reconstructing missing energy time-series in limited data regimes. In particular, multiple synthetic copies of a relatively small training dataset are stacked together with pseudo-random noise. First, an existing convolutional denoising autoencoder is selected from a previous...

Building Information Modeling (BIM) bietet als kooperative Arbeitsmethode das Potenzial, basierend auf maschinenlesbaren Informationen in Form von BIM-Modellen, mit verschiedenen Akteuren in einem effizienten Prozess zusammenzuarbeiten. Die Modelle müssen jedoch nicht immer über eine zwei- oder dreidimensionale Geometrie verfügen. Das Digitale Raum...

Diese Artikelserie stellt den Einsatz von Computerprogrammen in der Hochschullehre der Bauphysik und Gebäudetechnik für Architekten und Bauingenieure vor. Seit 2013 wird an der RWTH Aachen University am Lehrstuhl für Energieeffizientes Bauen E3D das Fach „Energetische Gebäudesimulation“ angeboten. Zielgruppe bilden die Kernstudiengänge „Bauingenieu...

Heating and ventilation in buildings and vehicles are responsible for over a third of global final energy usage and the resulting emissions. Local climatization can help to save energy while at the same time enable more individualized and adapted micro-climates around people. For the domain of local comfort, integrative test environments for sensor...

In planning tools for shallow geothermal source systems, the heat pump is often considered in a highly simplified way without any dedicated control behavior or individual system setup. In this article, the simplified black-box brine-to-water heat pump system model Model for Heat Pump Systems (ModHPS) for individual buildings up to city districts is...

Building Energy Performance Simulation (BEPS) plays a crucial role in planning energy-efficient buildings. For a BIM-based BEPS in EnergyPlus (E+), semantic geometric data can be obtained from IFC files. Within an automatic BEPS setup , incorrect IFC data often lead to erroneous E+ output files. Due to a persistent lack of visual validation tools,...

The decarbonisation goals for the building sector require the large-scale determination of buildings’ carbon footprints. For this purpose, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is generally used as a methodology to determine the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of individual buildings and districts. LCA tends to be granular, requiring a large amount of data an...

Using optimization to design a renewable energy system has become a computationally demanding task as the high temporal fluctuations of demand and supply arise within the considered time series. The aggregation of typical operation periods has become a popular method to reduce effort. These operation periods are modelled independently and cannot in...

Information exchange between Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools is challenging, since many applications use their own native data formats. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema, an open data exchange format for BIM, does not capture the full semantic meaning needed for direct use by different BIM tools and can be prone to information...

The availability of computational power, and a wealth of data from sensors have boosted the development of model-based predictive control for smart and effective control of advanced buildings in the last decade. More recently occupant-behavior models have been developed for including people in the building control loops. However, while important ob...

Building service systems are complex structures consisting of different subsystems and components in varying relationships. Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) can be used to represent these systems in decentralized triplestores using ontologies. To describe interconnected building service systems and the flow of matter, energy, and data between them o...

With an upsurge in the energy demand throughout the globe, efficient energy simulations and smart energy management solutions are imperative. Often a lack of substantial 3D geometrical data restricts simulation scientists and urban planners to analyse energy demand patterns on a city scale. Therefore, in this paper, the authors describe an open-sou...

*** 50 days free download: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1epWJ7tZ6ZxQmO *** Research on the drivers of energy-related behaviors in buildings has gained significant interest in recent years. However, existing studies are often limited to a restricted scope of analysis (e.g., single-domain and single-cultural contexts) and rely on simplistic data an...

In warm and hot climates, ceiling fans and/or air conditioners (ACs) are used to maintain thermal comfort. Ceiling fans provide air movement near the skin, which enhances the evaporation of sweat, reduces heat stress, and enhances thermal comfort. This is also called the cooling effect. However, AC usage behaviour and the effects of elevated air sp...

Der regulatorische Rahmen zum Klimaschutz ist seit 1976 sowohl international als auch national spezifiziert und verschärft worden. Mit dem KSG sind zuletzt sektorscharfe Emissionsziele verankert worden. GEG und BEG stellen dabei den aktuell gültigen regulatorischen Rahmen für bauliche Mindestanforderungen und Fördermaßnahmen dar. Die langjährige En...

Durch die Digitalisierung in der Bau- und Gebäudetechnik werden neue Potenziale erschlossen. Im Forschungsvorhaben Energie.Digital entwickeln deshalb die RWTH Aachen, das Fraunhofer ISE und die Viega GmbH & Co. KG eine durchgängige und systematische Methode zur Verknüpfung und Integration der Domänen Technische Gebäudeausrüstung (TGA), Gebäudeautom...

Urban Building Energy Modelling (UBEM) requires adequate geometrical information to represent buildings in a 3D digital form. However, open data models usually lack essential information, such as building geometries, due to a lower granularity in available data. For heating demand simulations, this scarcity impacts the energy predictions and, there...

In this paper, simulations of 500 open-source CityGML building models for heating demand calculation are presented. Using an archetype-based approach and statistical enrichment, Modelica simulations are carried out using the TEASER tool and Dymola. The authors compare the simulation results against measurement data and investigate the impact of yea...

Climate change, increasing emissions and rising global temperatures have gradually affected the way we think about the future of our planet. Urban areas possess significant potential for reducing the energy consumption of the overall energy system. In recent years, there is an increasing number of research initiatives related to Urban Building Ener...

In diesem Whitepaper werden Hemmnisse und Verbesserungsvorschläge zur Anwendung der BIM-Methode, die im Workshop „Energieeffizienz durch digitales Bauen mit BIM“ im Rahmen der wissenschaftlichen Begleitforschung Energiewendebauen (Modul Digitalisierung) ermittelt worden sind, vorgestellt und diskutiert. Die Hemmnisse (hier „Gründe des Scheiterns“ g...

Modern air conditioning makes up a large part of global energy consumption. HVAC systems are the most energy consuming devices in the building sector and also contribute to greenhouse gas emission in the transportation sector when used for vehicle cabin climatization. Conventional HVAC systems are designed to heat or cool air volumes of entire room...

Non-residential buildings are accountable for 11% of global energy-related CO2 emissions (United Nations Environment Programme 2018). To increase the performance in this sector, Building Energy Performance Simulation (BEPS) is one feasible approach. Therefore, there is need for reliable and fast simulation models. One feasible approach are so calle...

Virtual simulations and calculations are a key technology for future development methods. A variety of tools and methods for calculating thermal comfort have not gained sufficient acceptance in practice due to their inherent complexity. This article investigates alternative means of determining thermal comfort, namely, the linearization of the equi...

Non-residential buildings are accountable for 11 % of global energy-related CO2 emissions (United Nations Environment Programme 2018). To increase the performance in this sector, Building Energy Performance Simulation (BEPS) is one feasible approach. Therefore, there is need for reliable and fast simulation models. One feasible approach are so call...

This study explores the applicability of a deep learning-based approach for reconstructing missing room temperature data from different domains where relatively few training samples are available. For that purpose, the existing convolutional, long short-term memory (LSTM) and feed-forward autoencoders were combined with a suitable domain adaptation...

This paper explores the applicability of deep learning-driven models for the prediction of energy consumption in generic commercial buildings. The modeling approach relies on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), while the input consists of physical data streams such as indoor air temperature in different thermal zones and data obtained from the centra...

Poor indoor air quality, acoustics and lighting can affect well-being and productivity in classrooms. In naturally ventilated buildings, weather conditions and outside noise may prevent necessary window openings, making technological solutions appealing. The implementation of solutions to mechanically ventilate spaces and take the necessary measure...

This paper describes a CityGML Geometrical transformation and validation tool (CityGTV) enabling the interoperability of CityGML datasets for urban energy use cases. A brief explanation of the toolbox's functionalities along with the developed algorithms for the geometrical validation are described in this paper. Key Innovations - Open source trans...

The quality of BIM models is often insufficient for direct mapping into simulation models. Also, the IFC standard still has gaps, particularly in the area of representation of HVAC systems. Enrichment and advanced analysis functions nevertheless make it possible to generate simulation models semi-automatically and reduce effort and errors compared...

Building Information Modeling aims at the use of digital building data in all planning processes. However, several challenges arise when using BIM data in the IFC file format to create building simulation models. Complex, detailed or erroneous data and the lack of software interfaces complicate and delay the simulation preprocessing. One way to red...

Building energy performance simulation tools are being increasingly deployed by researchers and professionals to predict the thermal behavior of buildings. Validation methods are applied to ensure the accuracy of simulation results. Results and methods described in this paper are resulting from a research project funded by the German Federal Minist...

Energy performance simulation plays an important role for minimizing the energy consumption of buildings, thus reducing CO2 emissions and helping to enable the energy transition process. Within the design stage of buildings, the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard can be used as a common data exchange format between all stakeholders within t...

This paper describes a use case specific modification to the CityGML Energy Application Domain Extension (ADE) version 2.0. The application use cases considered for this paper are: (i) district level economic and ecological assessment of energy flows and self-sufficiency, (ii) life-cycle assessments (LCA) of climate related emissions and costs and...

This paper describes a CityGML Building Interpolation tool (CityBIT) for the creation of user-defined and interpolated building models for planned and/or existing buildings. A brief explanation of the tool's functionalities and the methodologies adapted to develop the tool are explained in this paper. The CityBIT aims to help urban planners and sim...

Enhancing interoperability and information exchange between domain-specific software products for BIM is an important aspect in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations industry. Recent research started investigating methods from the areas of machine and deep learning for semantic enrichment of BIM models. However, training and ev...

Die Präsentation stellt Parameterstudien zum Einfluss von Förderungen und der CO2-Bepreisung auf die Dimensionierung von geothermischen Wärmepumpensystemen im Vergleich zu einem Gas-Brennwertkessel vor. Weiterhin wird das Werkzeug GeoWPSys vorgestellt, mit dem die Studien erstellt wurden. Schließlich wird ein Ausblick auf eine ganzheitliche Werkzeu...

Enhancing interoperability and information exchange between domain-specific software products for BIM is an important aspect in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations industry. Recent research started investigating methods from the areas of machine and deep learning for semantic enrichment of BIM models. However, training and ev...

Für den in der HLH Bd. 72 (2021) Nr. 01-02 beschriebenen Systemkonfigurator (GeoWPSys) zur Untersuchung der Wirtschaftlichkeit von geothermischen Wärmepumpen werden in diesem Beitrag Parameterstudien vorgestellt, in denen sowohl spezifische als auch allgemeingültige Aussagen zum Dimensionierungsprozess von Wärmepumpensystemen erarbeitet und Praxisr...

The aim of this work is to develop and validate a miscellaneous electric loads (MEL) predictive model that does not require occupant-wise or building-wise model training nor model adaptation while achieving competitive accuracy. For that purpose, a long-short-term memory (LSTM) model was developed using monitored data from a research building locat...

In diesem Beitrag wird der Dimensionierungsablauf und die Wirtschaftlichkeitsberechnung des neu entwickelten Systemkonfigurators GeoWPSys beschrieben. Das Werkzeug liefert Dimensionierungsvorschläge für geothermische Wärmepumpen, Puffer- und TWW-Speicher anhand von Gebäude- und Anlagentechnikeingaben und vergleicht in jeder Berechnung die Wirtschaf...

As the number of installed meters in buildings increases, there is a growing number of data time-series that could be used to develop data-driven models to support and optimize building operation. However, building data sets are often characterized by errors and missing values, which are considered, by the recent research, among the main limiting f...

Die Arbeitsmethodik BIM ermöglicht Informationen, die bereits in der Planungsphase erfasst werden, durch einen konsistenten Informationsfluss in der Betriebsphase nutzbar zu machen. Aufgrund der dynamischen Randbedingungen eines Bauprojekts sowie der hohen Anzahl an beteiligten Akteuren und den daraus resultierenden vielseitigen Anforderungen beste...

Durch zentrale Klimatisierung werden große Luftvolumina in Büros und Privaträumen auf eine Komforttemperatur gebracht, die nur im direkten Umfeld von Personen wirklich erforderlich ist. Ansätze der lokalen Klimatisierung schaffen hier Abhilfe, eröffnen Einsparpotenziale und ermöglichen eine individuellere Klimatisierung. Am Lehrstuhl für Energieeff...

In diesem Kapitel wird BIM in den Kontext der Energiebedarfsermittlung und der Gebäudesimulation gesetzt. Es werden zunächst die verschiedenen Methoden der Energiebedarfsermittlung und TGA-Fachplanung vorgestellt und Bezug auf die entsprechenden normativen Vorschriften und Berechnungsgrundlagen genommen. Es werden Datenaustauschformate vorgestellt,...

de Integrale TGA‐Beschreibung: Topologie‐Extraktion und TUBES‐Ontologie. In diesem Beitrag werden die aktuellen Ergebnisse des Forschungsprojekts Energie.Digital vorgestellt. Ziel des Projekts ist eine integrale digitale Beschreibung der technischen Gebäudeausstattung. Dies umfasst Informationen zu den physikalischen und funktionalen Verknüpfungen,...

With the upsurge in the energy demand in Europe, the challenge to improve the existing building stock’s energetic performance calls out for a district and building level intervention through retrofitting measures. Often the amount and type of data required for the retrofit interventions are unclear, and it leaves the decision-makers in a dilemma wi...

District level energy simulations often require large datasets to extensively incorporate the semantic and topological information into the simulation environments. Moreover, the extraction and analysis of the desired data model can highly reduce the computational time resulting into higher efficiency. In this paper, an analysis toolbox is introduc...