Publications

The residential energy consumption has been growing in recent years and, in Brazil, actions aimed at increasing energy efficiency in these buildings resulted in the Technical Quality Requirements for Energy Efficiency Level of Residential Buildings (RTQ-R). The regulation is of a national certification that is part of the from the Brazilian Labeling Program of Inmetro and presents a prescriptive and a simulation method to evaluate the energy performance: the first is through equations; the second is through computer simulation. The effectiveness of RTQ-R depends on appropriate evaluation methods and its acceptance by the building market. However, it was found low applicability of RTQ-R over the five years in which the regulation is in force. Starting from the hipothesis that the certification provides scope for simplification, this study proposes a simplified method of evaluating the energy efficiency level for naturally ventilated buildings in the residential sector for PBE Edifica. The proposal was to simplify the calculation of the numerical equivalent of the envelope (EqNumEnv) and the water heating system. The method consists in defining representative models of existing Brazilian residential buildings; analysis of the influence of the variables of the prescriptive method equation in consumption indicators RTQ-R; and the development and validation of the proposed evaluation method from the comparison between the results obtained by the present method and the proposed. The simplification of EqNumEnv resulted in reduced equations tha vary with the type and bioclimatic zone (ZB) of evaluated building. The proposal has been validated as a percentage of convergence of results ranging of 97% to 100%, according to ZB analyzed. The proposal for the water heating system was adaptation of the calculation of annual solar fraction, conducted through monthly data, by calculating the solar fraction from the annual data. He effectiveness of the method was verified in seize cases and the average difference of the results of simplified method and of current was 0,00905. It is expected that the simplified method enables the consolidation of the RTQ-R in Brasil.