Rita Streblow

RWTH Aachen University · E.ON Energy Reserach Center, Institute for Energy Efficient Buildings and Indoor Climate

Local energy markets (LEMs) are a promising way to solve the challenges of the increasing extension of decentralized energy systems and to promote the further integration of renewable energy sources. LEMs enable costumers with distributed energy resources to trade and share their electrical energy with each other. In the existing literature, the re...

In dieser Veröffentlichung der BF2020 werden kurzfristige Maßnahmen zur Steigerung der Energieeffizienz im Betrieb von Gebäuden und Quartieren aufgezeigt. Zur Ermittlung wurden im Rahmen des 11. Projektleitungstreffens Energiewendebauen Kurzfragebögen unter den Teilnehmenden verteilt. Vertreter aus 46 Verbundprojekte haben an der Befragung teilgeno...

In practice, there are methods such as EN 15450 designing a heat pump system consisting of a heat pump, auxiliary heater, and thermal energy storage. In heat pumps, the refrigerant has a significant impact on the overall efficiency and thus on its sustainability. However, refrigerant selection is not considered in standard design procedures. Moreov...

Aiming at an emission-free building energy supply, air-source heat pump systems (HPSs) are promising to replace conventional technologies such as gas boilers. Currently, the overall costs of HPSs are higher than the costs for conventional systems, inhibiting HPS market penetration in existing buildings. Increasing the profitability of HPSs by reduc...

The introduction of high shares of renewable energy sources into the energy system leads to substantial changes in its operation. On the one hand, this holds true for the national energy system where the operation of conventional power plants needs to adapt to the availability of renewable energy sources. On the other hand, the electrical distribut...

The design of adaptive façades as complex systems that dynamically respond to weather conditions and occupants’ demands is rapidly increasing in modern constructions since they are highly energy efficient. Adaptive Dynamic Building Envelopes (ADBEs) exploit the benefits of technologies that manage the energy and mass transfer between building and o...

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...

Heat pump systems are the key technology towards the transformation to a sustainable building supply. While heating buildings with conventional technologies such as gas boilers is relatively easy to accomplish through high flow temperatures, heat pump systems are much more sensitive to changes in temperature demands and heat loads. Simultaneously,...

https://bs2021.org/workshops/#2

The design of heat pump systems for the building sector in Germany bases on standardized calculation methods as defined in DIN EN 15450. This procedure designs a heat pump, an electric heater and thermal storage tanks. However, these procedures do not consider the working fluid, which influences the overall system performance. The selection of an o...

Within a conference workshop, we present the Urban Energy Lab 4.0 - Refrigerant Lab and investigations, which we conducted in this Lab. We conclude our talks and lead to panel discussion to deduce the outlook for natural refrigerants in heat pumps: --- 1. “Introduction to Urban Energy Lab 4.0” by Prof. Dr. Rita Streblow --- 2. “Refrigerant Lab –An...

The integration of volatile, decentralized energy into building energy systems and electrical grids requires intelligent algorithms that are capable of controlling the augmented complexity and the interactions of subsystems efficiently. Not only do the algorithms require computing capacity, but also a feasible information and communication infrastr...

An der RWTH Aachen werden im Verbundprojekt Urban Energy Lab 4.0 Lösungen für Forschungsfragen der Energiewende im Gebäudesektor entwickelt. Gemeinsam wollen die Beteiligten eine hoch vernetzte Infrastruktur für die Konzeption und Analyse neuer städtischer Energieversorgungskonzepte entwickeln. Speziell zur Erforschung emissionsarmer Wärmepumpen wi...

As part of the European Commission Horizon 2020 Plug-N-Harvest project consortium, authors hosted a 90-minute workshop to discuss issues related the modular façade retrofit development in Europe on Sustainable Places 2019 conference at Cagliari, Italy on 6th June 2019. This post-workshop report outlined research outputs presented by four speakers f...

Journal of Facade Design and Engineering Volume 7/Number 1/2019 Special Issue Powerskin 2019 https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/jfde/issue/view/612/Powerskin The construction of office buildings in particular, as well as multi-family dwellings, are largely based on regular planning grids, and the widths of such grids appear to be repetiti...

PLUG-N-HARVEST, an EU-funded project, investigates a modular facade system for the retrofitting of existing buildings. Within the consortium, consisting of research, industrial and local government partners from Germany, Greece, Spain, the United Kingdom and Romania, the RWTH Aachen University is responsible for the design and the prototype develop...

Laboratories offer the possibility to study occupant behavior in a very detailed manner. A wide range of indoor environmental scenarios can be simulated under precisely controlled conditions, and human subjects can be selected based on pre-defined criteria. The degree of control over experiments is high and a large number of physical, physiological...

The objective of this research is to evaluate the performance of a system of systems optimization algorithm, namely, L4G-PCAO, in building energy systems. Since the test bed of this research is an office building with more than two hundred occupiers, the heating and cooling demands of the building must always be fully satisfied. Consequently, chang...

Low insulation standards and obsolete heating systems of a large amount of buildings in Europe account for disproportional energy consumption. Within this project, the holistic renovation and the results from the monitoring activity of buildings from a field test, located in Southern Germany, are presented. The buildings, built at the end of the 19...

In many urban contexts, energy systems are undergoing fundamental change towards more interconnected system layouts. Appropriate planning tools are necessary to guide this transition towards more energy efficient system designs. Thus, the aim of this paper is to present workflow automation approaches to model buildings and district energy systems f...

TGA-Kongress 2016 - Innovationen in der Raumlufttechnik, Forschung und Wissenschafton, Berlin (Germany), 14 Apr 2016 - 15 Apr 2016

The increase in fluctuating renewable electricity generation requires growing flexibility and balancing capacities in the electric energy grid. Storage systems can provide the necessary balancing capacities. Therefore, it is analyzed which potential for flexible energy consumption can be found in private households. Heat and power in private househ...

Building thermal wall mass provides a flexible heat capacity which can be effectively used for load shifting, thus enabling demand side management (DSM). The most crucial barrier for a practical application of buildings as short term heat storage is the lack of knowledge about the building physical properties. This study presents a model identifica...

The increase in fluctuating renewable electricity generation requires growing flexibility and balancing capacities in the electric energy grid. Storage systems can provide the necessary balancing capacities. Therefore, it is analyzed which potential for flexible energy consumption can be found in private households. Heat and power in private househ...

Proceedings of Buidling Simulation 2015

For building performance simulations of multiple buildings, varying objectives and data availability lead to different requirements for various model applications. Flexibility regarding spatial discretization, parameterization and process automation can offer an alternative to specifically tailored models for each application. We present adaptive l...

Rapid urbanization leads to a concentration of energy consumption within cities. Therefore, city systems offer great potential for energy savings and greenhouse gas emission reduction. In this paper, we describe a methodology for city district energy system modeling and simulation. A PostgreSQL database (DB) builds the tool core. The DB is linked t...

In this paper, the impact of modelling furniture and floor covering in thermal building simulations is analysed and a distinct effect upon the simulated room temperatures under dynamic temperature control conditions is found. For the thermal steady state, the impact is negligible and for short-time temperature reductions, as know from night tempera...

In this study, the fossil-fueled heating circuit and the corresponding automation system of a multi-functional building are simulated to lay the foundation for in-depth analysis and optimization of the building energy concept. The considered building is the E.ON Energy Research Center main building which is equipped with a highly integrated energy...

Models of large thermo-fluid networks can be useful to better understand the dynamic behavior of complex systems. Yet, numerical outputs and line plots of individual variables may not be sufficient ways of processing the simulation results for the user. Thus, the aim of this paper is to present a visualization approach by means of graph drawing. To...

This paper presents an application of the hardware-in-the-loop-method to a building energy and control system. We focus on investigating the interaction of a real circulating pump with the hydronic network of a virtual building energy and control system. For real-time simulation the building envelope is modelled using the Modelica-based library Aix...

This paper describes the implementation of a Modelica library that is designed to enable fast composition and simulation of building heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. The library is based on an approach which is focusing on the thermal behavior of the components. Compared to existing libraries, it has no information about th...

Urbanization causes increasing energy demand within cites. To identify energy saving potentials on city district scale, integral planning approaches are necessary. This paper describes the development of a city information model (CIM) with focus on buildings and energy systems. It accounts for different building and energy system types plus geometr...

A transition in the electricity market is required to manage the volatility of increasing renewable energy generation. These fluctuations can be faced with flexible consumption through Demand Side Management (DSM), establishment of further centralized storage capacities and provisioning of dynamic back up generation capacities. At least the latter...

Poorly designed and badly working control systems in buildings are leading to a high waste of primary energy in the building sector. In literature many approaches use agent based control (ABC) in order to facilitate the configuration of these systems and thus reduce the error rate at commissioning processes. These approaches increase the energy eff...

The linkage of combined heating and power (CHP) systems with local heating networks has the potential to increase energy efficiency on city district scale. First, CHP systems have a high overall efficiency. Second, the usage of CHP systems as heat sources for local heating networks can lead to advantageous economics of scale effects. With an increa...

The shift towards a more sustainable energy supply relies on an increased use of renewable energy sources (RESs), such as wind energy converters and photovoltaic generation. However, the RES generation highly fluctuates, therefore requiring novel control strategies to ensure grid stability and security of energy supply. Demand side management (DSM)...

In this work, a mixed integer linear programming (MIP) approach for the optimal design of energy systems in residential buildings is presented. The optimization model considers the economic criteria of the guideline VDI 2067. The objective of the MIP is to minimize the annual costs which comprise the investment as well as demand- and operation-rela...

Energy efficiency of buildings has been identified as a core element in facing the climate change and the scarcity of energy resources. The energy supply system for a building is, especially with view on thermal interrelations, a highly complex and heterogeneous system that emerges jointly with the building construction, the user's behavior, the we...

The detection of occupants in indoors can be fundamental for a correct operation of the installed engineering systems (e.g. lighting, ventilation, heating and cooling). Further, real occupancy profiles can be used as input of stochastic models for dynamic simulation of buildings and their engineering systems. In this work an algorithm for the detec...

In this study, four approaches to model stratification in thermal energy storage (TES) units with mixed-integer linear programs are introduced. These stratification models are compared with the widely utilized capacity model, in which TES units are modeled as homogeneous volumes. The approaches are verified with a use case consisting of a single bu...

Auf den Gebäudebereich entfallen in Europa rund 40 % des Endenergieverbrauchs und somit etwa ein Drittel der CO2‐Emissionen. In Deutschland wurden drei Viertel der Bestandsgebäude vor 1979 erstellt, die meisten dieser Gebäude sind gar nicht oder kaum energetisch saniert. Die Sanierungsquote ist momentan sehr gering und liegt bei knapp 1,1 %. Hier s...

The increasing installation of volatile renewable energy sources like photovoltaics and wind enforces the need for flexibility options to match the renewable generation with the demand. One of these options is Demand Side Management (DSM) in the context of building energy systems combined with thermal storage systems. This paper discusses such conc...

RWTH Aachen University operates an own district energy system (DES), consisting of a district heating (DHS) and a district cooling system (DCS), which provide the Campus Melaten with thermal energy. In the near future a significant decrease of heat demand is expected. This results in a reorganisation of the DES, involving a development of new energ...

This paper introduces a decentralized scheduling scheme for electro-thermal heating systems i.e. heat pumps and combined heat and power units. The scheduling is modeled as a mixed integer linear optimization program (MILP) and reformulated based on the Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition method. The decomposed problem is solved by means of an iterative col...

The energetic optimization of city districts offers great potential for primary energy saving and CO2-emission reduction. Until now the optimization has primarily focused on individual buildings or homogeneous building groups and therefore, neglects possible synergy effects within heterogeneous city zones. This paper presents a holistic approach fo...

Die Nutzung von Lüftungskanälen stellt eine Möglichkeit dar, Funksignale innerhalb von Gebäuden zuverlässig zu übertragen. Die vorliegenden Untersuchungen zeigen auf, dass eine stabile Signalqualität erzielt werden kann. Reflexionen und konstruktive Überlagerung der Signale führen bei gleicher Sendeleistung und gleicher Entfernung im Kanal zu höher...