Investigation of Building Profiles for the Energy Simulation of a Factory Building: A Case Study in South Korea

In the Republic of Korea, the 2030 Nationally Determined Contributions aim for carbon neutrality by 2050, with the building sector targeting a 32.8% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 compared with the 2018 baseline. To achieve these goals, significant efforts are underway to improve the energy efficiency of buildings. Building energy simulation is a standard method for evaluating energy performance as it assesses the current performance and predicts the potential contributions of energy retrofitting initiatives. However, industrial factories often lack specific energy simulation profiles, posing a challenge for accurate energy performance assessment. This case study aims to bridge this gap by investigating a detailed building profile for factory building based on the extended operational data and experimental measurements within a live factory setting. Energy simulations employing these factory-specific profiles yielded R2 values (coefficient of determination) of 98.2% and 94.1% for cooling and heating energy accuracy, respectively, when compared with the actual monthly consumption data. Additionally, simulations with these profiles demonstrated a 2.81% improvement in R2 accuracy compared to those using conventional office building profiles, particularly enhancing the precision during the cooling season. These findings highlight the effectiveness of customized profiles in building energy simulations, ensuring more precise and reliable energy efficiency assessments.

This creative work has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license which allows copying, and redistribution as well as adaptation of the original work provided appropriate credit is given to the original author and the conditions of the license are met.