Russian Apartment Building Thermal Response Models for Retrofit Selection and Verification

Peter Armstrong, Jim Dirks, Ray Reilly, Bill Currie, and Ron Nesse, Battelle, Pacific Northwest Division
Oleg Komarov and Boris Nekrasov, Foundation for Enterprise Restructuring and Financial Institutions Development

Keywords

Abstract

The Enterprise Housing Divestiture Project (EHDP) aims to identify cost-effective energy efficiency and conservation measures for Russian enterprise-owned apartment buildings and to implement these measures in the entire stock of buildings undergoing divestiture in six cities. Short-term measurements of infiltration and exterior wall heat-loss coefficient were made in the cities of Cheropovets, Orenburg, Petrozavodsk, Ryazan, and Vladimir. Long-term monitoring equipment was installed in six or more buildings in each of the aforementioned and in the city of Volxhov. The results of these measurements will be used to validate models for selecting optimal retrofit packages and to verify energy savings. The retrofit categories representing the largest technical potential in these buildings are envelope, heat recovery, and heating/hot water system improvements. This paper describes efforts to establish useful thermal models to aid in retrofit selection and for measuring the savings generated by completed retrofits. The model structures and analytical methods for obtaining building parameters from time series weather, energy use, and thermal response data are developed. Our experience applying these methods to two nominally identical 5-story apartment buildings in the city of Ryazan is presented. Building envelope UAs inferred from measured whole-building thermal response data are compared with UAs based on Uvalues obtained by ASTM in-situ measurements of 20 Ryazan wall sections. The UAs obtained by these independent measurements differ by less than 7%.