Comprehensive Room Transfer Functions for Efficient Calculation of the Transient Heat Transfer Processes in Buildings

This paper describes a method in which the transfer functions describing heat flows in building elements can be combined into a single transfer function for an enclosure, referred to as a comprehensive room transfer function (CRTF). The method accurately models long-wave radiation exchange and convection in an enclosure through an approximate network, referred to as the “star” network. Resistances in the star network are determined from a network that uses view factors to model long-wave radiation exchange. The Pade´ approximation and bilinear transformation are used to reduce the number of coefficients in a CRTF.