"Visualizing the exergy destructed in exergy delivery chain in relation to human thermal comfort with ExFlow"

Exergy analysis is an important tool to fully appreciate the usability of energy at different levels and has been widely applied in the building system analysis domain. It has became more useful as low temperature heating and high temperature cooling began to attract more attention both in Europe and the United States. Using low-grade energy to supply for these systems have, in return, led to an increase in awareness of low exergy (LowEx) system designs. The possibility of modeling the last missing link in the system that is to delivery thermal comfort, the human body, have therefore became a topic that increasingly draws the attention of many more researchers. Due to the complexity of these human body exergy models, it is very rare for these models to be linked back to building systems and produce an exergy efficiency for occupants’ thermal comfort. Attempting to fill in the blanks of overall system exergy efficiency on delivery occupant thermal comfort, we have developed a visualization algorithm that could visually assess the exergy efficiency in comfort delivery. Using the ExFlow tool, it is much clearer and easier to determine the relationship of how much primary energy input is eventually converted to the energy that is used to condition for the occupants’ comfort.