Progress and challenges of the development of design weather parameters for building air-conditioning system: A literature review

In the context of the imperative for energy saving and carbon reduction, along with increasing attention to public health, developing advanced design weather parameters is crucial for designing air-conditioning (AC) systems that can reduce energy consumption and maintain acceptable indoor environment. Traditional design weather parameters that are excessively extreme lead to overestimated design cooling loads, resulting in oversized AC systems and wasting energy. This study conducts a comprehensive analysis concerning inherent limitations of traditional design weather parameters and identifies critical factors for determining rational design weather parameters. Due to improper adoptions of fictitious design weather parameters and outdoor non-guarantee rate in traditional methods, the designed AC systems exhibit poor energy performance and deviate from the design objective. Therefore, a novel framework is developed based on the joint mapping relationship between outdoor weather parameters and indoor cooling loads, joint distribution characteristics of weather parameters, and feature importance analysis to improve the accuracy of design weather parameters. On this basis, general coincident design days (CDDs) corresponding to room categories are derived to adapt to engineering applications. Besides, a CDD prediction method based on a decision chain is proposed for big data applications. AC systems designed by CDDs are demonstrated to achieve energy conservation and maintain indoor thermal comfort. The future research is intended to promote more refined and flexible CDDs to cope with environmental pressures and extend their applications while improving energy efficiency.