New Concept for Museum Storage Buildings – Evaluation of Building Performance Model for Simulation of Storage

Museums keep and protect a part of our material cultural heritage for future generations; however the museums only exhibit a little part of their collections and most of the objects are kept in storage. Unfortunately the climates of many storage rooms are not ideal for keeping the chemical and physical decay of the objects as low as possible.

Museum storage buildings should be able to provide a considerable stable indoor environment in terms of temperature and relative humidity. This paper explores how to simulate and build low energy museums storage buildings, and the paper shows that it is possible to make a building of low building expenses, very low running expenses and very high quality.

In addition it is described that the energy consumption is only 2% compared to normal HVAC solutions, and the 2% can be delivered by excess wind power from Danish windmills resulting in that the building is close to be CO2 neutral. The analysis shows very good agreement between simulations and measurements, meaning that the proposed methods can be used for designing museum storage buildings.

The analysis also shows, that the weather conditions of previous years, affect the indoor environment of the following years.