Written during Spring and Autumn 2020 as an attempt to make something out the global lock-downs, these pages present an overview of building physics applications in python language for students, teachers or engineers.
At one end of the scientific literature, profusion of books about solving partial differential equations exist, however often with a somewhat unfamiliar mathematical formalism. At the other end, books about building physics may be either technical about HVAC or generic about the numerical models used.
Having struggled quite a bit in the past years with the practical implementation of numerical methods in this field, it appeared that putting together the recipes used in a modern programming language could be of some interest for others.
The parti pris in this book is hence to show the link between the governing equations and how to solve
them, aiming at a practical use, namely how to make things work. It is meant to be a toolbox for simulation engineering, a basis for the illustration of theory, or a kick-start for the study of more complex
problems.
This manual is composed of three chapters, with a gradual increase in the difficulty:
Succinctly explains the fundamentals of the numerical methods used.
Explanation of various integration schemes with code examples
Shows applications to heat transfer in phase change materials, PID control and indoor air quality.
Application example : Room model coupled with a heating system
Application example : Indoor air particle filtration cost and service estimation
Is about coupled problems and minimisation. Applications to polydispersed aerosols in enclosures, heat and mass transfer in walls and parameter fitting for transient problems are proposed.
Application example : Heat and Mass Transfer within a wall
Application example : Automatic tuning of a PID controller
Application example : Parameter fitting on a partial differential equation representing train traffic
For all cases examined in the following chapters, source code or supplementary material such as pollution/weather data are available. Two types of users may be interested:
-
If you want to play with the parameters of the models described, a simple a web browser is sufficient, as interactive plots are at your disposal for many of the examples via the use of jupyter notebooks.
-
If you intend to make your own tests or applications, the code can be downloaded from this Github repository.
In each section, a specific link pointing to the corresponding address of the procedure in the repository is provided. Have fun!
As a few animations are presented throughout the sections, you may find it enjoyable to read these pages with a compatible PDF viewer (such as Adobe Reader or Foxit).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons “AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported” license.
This book is free, open and available online. If you found it of any use, you are most welcome to cite it with this reference:
@book{walther2021,
title = {Building Physics Applications in Python},
author = {Walther, E.},
year = {2021},
publisher = {DIY Spring},
address = {Paris}
}