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• Time Use Survey data used profiles of occupancy and energy behaviours. • Patterns were time-dependent and affected by household size. • Behaviour patterns were aggregated to produce hourly energy demand profiles. Occupants' interactions with building components determine the timing and magnitude of energy demand. Therefore a more realistic representation of energy-related occupant behaviours in energy simulations will enhance the accuracy of predicted building energy demand. The aim of this paper was to assess occupancy and behavioural patterns in Australian households based on a detailed time use survey, which collected daily activities from 6,902 persons in 3,626 households. Profiles of occupancy state and energy-related activities were analysed for different seasons, day of the week, and household compositions. The activity sequences were further aggregated to reproduce the total time use for the activities and occupancy states. The results showed that occupancy and the timing of energy related activities were time dependent and were also affected by season, day of week, and household composition. The outcomes can be used as input to simulation tools where realistic occupant behaviour should be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outdoor thermal comfort (OTC) directly impacts on health and wellbeing of inhabitants while it increases cooling energy demand of buildings. In this regards, different computational models and tools are developed to investigate the impact of built environments on pedestrian thermal comfort. However, in most of these models, the coeffects of solar radiation and local wind velocity are not simultaneously investigated where models are either simplified on solar calculations when are focused on wind or vice versa. This paper proposes a novel simulation framework to develop a high-resolution, but computationally efficient procedure, to couple radiative and convective fluxes in outdoor environments using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and building energy simulation (BES) approaches. The workflow is implemented in Grasshopper platform fed by outputs of ANSYS-Fluent as the CFD tool and EnergyPlus as the BES tool. The performance of the framework is evaluated using a case study, representing a simplified neighbourhood on a typical hot day. In comparison with the traditional models, results highlight on a considerable change in the OTC values using the proposed model. Results show that the alteration is highly related to the temporal aspects and OTC results experience changes from 5% to 40% in compared to the original OTC values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]