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Thermal Model of a House using Electric Circuits Analogy
Xhilda Merkaj
1 a
, Darjon Dhamo
2 b
and Eglantina Kalluc¸i
1
1
Applied Mathematics Department, Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Tirana, Tirana, Albania
2
Automation Department, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnic University of Tirana, Tirana, Albania
Keywords:
Smart Grid, Green Communications, Energy Efficiency, Energy Aware.
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to produce a thermal model of a house using electrical circuit analogy which gives
information about indoor temperatures and power consumption of electrical heater in each room of the house.
The information obtained from the power consumption of each electrical heater serves to estimate the peak
consumption which gives problems in the grid. The house under survey has 5 rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom,
a kitchen, a living-room, and an anteroom. The layers of internal and external walls, windows, roofs and
floors are thermal modeling into electrical components from which a circuit is assembled. Using node voltage
method in each circuit a state space equations are obtained, each of this equations are simulated in MATLAB
environment considering electrical heater time of use based on occupant behavior. Having this model allows
us to simulate the change of temperature of each room, design efficiency the controls algorithm and estimates
peak consumption for improving its reduction.
1 INTRODUCTION
A recent report from the International Energy Agency
(IEA, 2018) shows that energy consumption has in-
creased, especially in the residential and commer-
cial buildings sector. Excessive energy consumption
nowadays has caused problems for the environment
due to the increase in carbon emissions and there-
fore the reduction of energy consumption especially
in buildings is a trend in the world today. Statistics
(ERE, 2017) show that in Albania only 49 of total en-
ergy goes to residential users. Seeing these problems
we decided that the main contribution in this paper is
to use analogies between thermal and electrical mod-
els and methods in order to obtain a better durabil-
ity in terms of increasing energy efficiency in build-
ings. This analogy is the most important objective
for smart grid technologies. Reduction of energy con-
sumption can be done by choosing materials that are
good thermal insulators or with efficient management
of heating or cooling. An energy efficient building has
many advantages including reduction of the green-
house effect, environment degradation, consumption
of natural resources, energy dependence on the out-
side and environmental damage and pollution. It de-
crease costs in energy from houses and businesses, in-
a
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8084-2907
b
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0058-6550
crease the security of the energy supply and decrease
production costs.In this article the thermal model of
a house is created using electric circuit analogy (Par-
nis, 2012),(Vasak et al., 2011), (Ivan et al., 2017). The
house is composed of 5 rooms where each of them has
an RC circuit model where R and C represent respec-
tively the resistance and thermal capacity of the ma-
terial of the layer of walls, ceiling, foundation, win-
dows and doors presented in section 2. The current in
the circuit represents the heat flux and the electric po-
tential at the point represents the temperature of that
point. A model of state space was obtained in each of
the circuits. In section 3 we present the temperatures
and power consumed by the heaters in each room.
The results are obtained by simulating the state space
model in the MATLAB environment (Behravan et al.,
2017)for 168 hours. We are considering outdoor tem-
perature variation for typical winter day in Tirana Al-
bania (Lee et al., 2016). The model in MATLAB also
includes a program that determines the working time
of heaters. Knowing that during working days in Al-
bania normal working time is 08:00-16:00. The total
power consumed by heaters over a week is shown in
section 4 including peak power consumption occur-
rence and its value.
Merkaj, X., Dhamo, D. and Kalluçi, E.
Thermal Model of a House using Electric Circuits Analogy.
DOI: 10.5220/0010401000810088
In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems (SMARTGREENS 2021), pages 81-88
ISBN: 978-989-758-512-8
Copyright
c
2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
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