Inverse Identification of Equivalent Thermophysical Properties for Building Energy Analysis Under Dynamic Boundary Conditions

The evaluation of building energy performance under dynamic conditions requires reliable estimates of the thermophysical properties of envelope components. In existing buildings, however, the properties of multilayer walls are often unknown or uncertain, limiting the applicability of detailed physical models. To address this issue, this study proposes an inverse modeling framework for identifying the equivalent thermophysical parameters of a multilayer wall through a simplified homogeneous one-dimensional conduction model. The equivalent parameters are determined by matching the inner-side dynamic thermal response of the homogeneous model to that of the actual multilayer structure under the same external excitation. The approach explicitly accounts for the role of inner boundary conditions, which govern both the identifiability of the equivalent parameters and the formulation of the inverse problem. Adiabatic, isothermal, and more general inner boundary conditions are analyzed to determine how many independent parameters can be reliably identified and which response variables should be used in the objective function. Synthetic datasets, generated via numerical simulations driven by real weather data, are first employed to assess the method and to quantify the effect of transient initialization. The framework is then applied to experimental measurements collected from a full-scale test room. The results show that, under adiabatic conditions, the wall dynamics can be accurately reproduced by identifying a single equivalent thermal diffusivity, whereas isothermal and near-isothermal conditions require the simultaneous estimation of thermal conductivity and volumetric heat capacity. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that inverse formulations based on inner heat flux are significantly more robust than temperature-based formulations, particularly when the inner-surface temperature is weakly varying or tightly controlled, as commonly occurs in real buildings. In a nearly isothermal experimental case, the inverse identification failed (EFT=−5.76) when based on the inner-surface temperature, while it resulted in a better match (EFq=0.63) when based on the inner heat flux. Overall, the proposed framework provides a physically consistent and practically robust methodology for the dynamic thermal characterization of multilayer building walls using equivalent homogeneous models.