Design of experiments for Quick U-building method for building energy performance measurement

Quick U-building (QUB) is a method for short time measurement of energy performance of buildings, typically one night. It uses the indoor air temperature response to the power delivered to the indoor air by electric heaters. This paper introduces a method for estimating the expected measurement error as a function of the amplitude and the time duration of the input signal based on the decomposition of the time response of a state-space model into a sum of exponentials by using the eigenvalues of the state matrix. It is shown that the buildings have a group of dominant time constants, which gives an exponential response, and many very short and very large time constants, which have a small influence on the response. The analysis of the eigenvalues demonstrates that the QUB experiment may be done in a rather short time as compared with the largest time constant of the building.