A method of determining typical meteorological year for evaluating overheating performance of passive buildings

In the simulation of building overheating risks, the use of typical meteorological years (TMY) can greatly reduce the simulation workload and accurately reflect the distribution of simulation results according to the weather conditions over a given period. However, all meteorological parameters in most current TMY methods use a uniform weighting factor which may make the simulation results against the actual simulation results of the period and negatively affect the accuracy of the evaluation results. In addition to differences in climate characteristics between climate zones, the sensitivity of different simulation results to external parameters will also be different. Therefore, a TMY method based on the Finkelstein-Schafer statistical method is proposed, which considers the climatic characteristics of different regions and the correlation with the output parameters of indoor simulation to select the typical month. The proposed method is demonstrated in the three future scenarios for the three cities in different climate zones in China. The results show that the traditional TMY method has an overestimated weight of solar radiation and wind speed and an undervalued weight of dry bulb temperature when indoor temperature-related indicators are the output target. Compared with the traditional TMY method, the TMY generated by the improved method is closer to the distribution characteristics of the long-term outdoor weather data. Furthermore, when using the improved TMY data to evaluate the overheating performance of the passive residential buildings, the difference of the results of the unmet degree hours, indoor overheating degree, and the overheating escalation factor between the long-term projected data and the TMY data can be reduced by 63%–67% compared with the traditional TMY data.