Exergy-based ecological network analysis for building and community energy systems

Although buildings are transitioning towards complex, dynamic, and interconnected systems, traditional engineering metrics that dominate today don't capture several important whole-network properties. To address this, this paper adopts ecological network analysis (ENA), which has numerous successes for natural ecosystems and socio-technical systems but has yet to be applied for buildings. After translating ENA into comprehensive mathematical models for engineering applications, the novel ENA method is demonstrated with building and community energy systems. For the models to suit building energy systems, which have multiple energy types and non-negligible dynamics, ENA is formulated on an exergy basis, with dynamic flows and balances (i.e., time-varying storages). To demonstrate the proposed approach, ENA is used to redesign the heating and cooling systems for an office building and data center, coupling the buildings together via ambient-loop district energy. The models are implemented using the equation-based Modelica language. Results indicate that the ENA-guided redesign reduces the source energy by 15%. The energy consumed by the heating and cooling systems is reduced by 84% with negligible sacrifice to the thermal performance. Surprisingly, the redesign also reduced the exergy efficiency of the total system from 60% to 34% due to a greater decrease in exergy output relative to exergy input with low-exergy system designs. This indicates that ENA and other network approaches that classify system organization may outperform traditional efficiency-based metrics for building and community energy systems when whole-system perspectives are desired.

© This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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Work Title Exergy-based ecological network analysis for building and community energy systems
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Open Access
Creators
  1. Kathryn Hinkelman
  2. Saranya Anbarasu
  3. Wangda Zuo
Keyword
  1. District energy
  2. Dynamic systems
  3. Ecosystem biomimicry
  4. Exergy
  5. Graph theory
  6. Modelica
License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. Energy and Buildings
Publication Date December 5, 2023
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2023.113807
Deposited May 10, 2024

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Version 1
published

  • Created
  • Added J77_Exergy-BasedEcologicalNetworkAnalysis-KHinkelman.pdf
  • Added Creator Kathryn Hinkelman
  • Added Creator Saranya Anbarasu
  • Added Creator Wangda Zuo
  • Published
  • Updated
  • Updated Keyword, Publication Date Show Changes
    Keyword
    • District energy, Dynamic systems, Ecosystem biomimicry, Exergy, Graph theory, Modelica
    Publication Date
    • 2024-01-15
    • 2023-12-05