Impact of ELA Calibration Methods on Building Energy Model Fidelity

As building performance is increasingly improved and building energy consumption decreases, a greater percentage of the total energy loss of a building occurs through envelope leakage. This leakage is characterized by the effective leakage area or ELA. Current building performance simulation (BPS) uses software modules that approximately calculate envelope infiltration, but the literature shows that their calibration and validation is still unsatisfactory. This paper develops a new framework to address calibration and validation for different combinations of data and model fidelity, where each combination leads to probability distributions of the calibration parameter set. It does so by conducting calibration for different experiments, i.e., with different data resolutions, and for different model fidelities. The calibration is anchored around ELA and its impact on "best estimates" of other parameters is verified.