Artificial neural networks for predicting indoor temperature using roof passive cooling techniques in buildings in different climatic conditions

Three passive cooling methods (e.g. roof pond, reflective roof cooling and using insulation over the roof) have been experimentally evaluated using an experimental test structure. The objective of this work is to train an artificial neural network (ANN) to learn and predict the indoor temperature of room with the different experimental data. Different training algorithms (traingd, traingdm, traingdx, trainrp, traincgp, traincgf, traincgb, trainscg, trainbfg, trainoss, trainlm, and trainbr) were used to create an ANN model. This study is helpful in finding the thermal comfort of building by applying different passive cooling techniques. The data presented as input were outside temperature, relative humidity, solar intensity and wind speed. The network output was indoor temperature. The advantages of this approach are (i) the speed of calculation, (ii) the simplicity, (iii) adaptive learning from examples and thus gradually improve its performance, (iv) self-organization and (vi) real time operation. Results proved highly satisfactory and provided enough confidence for the process to be extended to a larger solution space for which there is uneconomical and time consuming way of calculating the solution. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.