1,721,062 research outputs found
Present and future potential of natural night ventilation in nZEBs
Full text linkThe increase in the energy need for cooling is one of the major challenges in nearly Zero Energy Buildings. Recent constructions are characterized by high thermal insulation levels, which can be effective in preventing summer discomfort in combination with accurate control of solar gains through glazed surfaces and discharge of overall gains via ventilation. In addition, urbanization, densification and the global warming trends registered in the last decades can increase the risk and magnitude of overheating effect if an accurate design and use of correct technologies and good practices are not considered. The paper investigates the effects and the potential of natural night ventilation, as a strategy to reduce the energy need for cooling even taking into account the evolution of surrounding urban area with the exacerbation of urban heat island under future weather projections. Among the different tools available for the assessment of the cooling potential in buildings, the research focuses on two methodologies, which are adaptable to the conceptual design phase, where a first approximation of the natural ventilation potential is required. The study is developed on the weather datasets referred to the area of Milan and shows the future evolution of the night cooling potential, highlighting the importance of orienting building design towards greater integration between different passive cooling strategies for the summer period
A data-driven procedure to model occupancy and occupant-related electric load profiles in residential buildings for energy simulation
Full text linkImproving the reliability of energy simulation outputs is becoming a pressing task to reduce the performance gap between the design and the operation of buildings. Occupant behaviour modelling is one of the most relevant sources of uncertainty in building energy modelling and is typically modelled via a priori choices made by modellers. Thus, an improvement in the description of occupant behaviour is needed. To this regard, the availability of smart meter recordings might help to generate more reliable input data for building energy models. This paper discusses a novel data-driven procedure that enables to create yearly occupancy and occupant-related electric load profiles to inform building energy modelling, using a typical uneven database made available by energy operators. The procedure is subdivided into three main tasks. The first has the intent to detect representative occupant-related electric load profiles from smart meters readings. The second task aims to generate yearly occupancy profiles from the same database. The last task assesses the impact of the generated occupancy and occupant-related electric load profiles on building energy simulation outputs. The procedure is applied to the case study of a multi-residential building in Milan, Italy and is meant to show the possibility to overcome deterministic inputs that might have little relation with the actual building operation. It showed a substantial improvement in the reliability of building energy simulation and that occupant related load profiles may account for about 8% of the building's energy need for space heating
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Retrofitting Buildings into Thermal Batteries for Demand-Side Flexibility and Thermal Safety during Power Outages in Winter
Full text linkDecarbonizing heating in buildings is a key part of climate change mitigation policies, but deep retrofit is progressing slowly, e.g., at a pace of 0.2%/y of the building stock in Europe. By means of tests in two flats of a multiapartment housing complex recently renovated to very low values of energy needs, this paper explores the role of deep retrofitted buildings in providing energy flexibility services for the occupants/owners/managers and for the energy system. Key to this flexibility increase and capacity savings is the large reduction of energy needs for heating via a high level of external insulation, which allows the thermal capacity of the building mass to act as an energy storage, without the large energy losses presently affecting a large part of the building stock. Due to the limited number of case studies reporting experimental applications in real buildings, this research aims to offer an analysis based on a series of tests and detailed monitoring which show a significant increase in the time interval during which the low-energy-needs building remains in the comfort range, compared to a high-energy-needs building, when active delivery of energy is deactivated during the heating season. Intermittent renewable energy might hence be stored when available, thus enhancing the ability of the energy system to manage inherent variability of some renewable energy sources and/or increasing the share of the self-consumption of locally generated RES energy. Besides, two unplanned heating power outages which have involved the entire building complex allowed us to verify that deep retrofitted buildings are able to maintain thermally safe indoor conditions under extreme events, such as a power outage, for at least 5 days
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Espressione dei recettori per i fattori di crescita fibroblastici nelle cellule endocrine normali e nei relativi tumori gastrointestinali
No full textASHRAE Likelihood of Dissatisfaction: a new right-here and right-now thermal comfort index for assessing the Likelihood of Dissatisfaction according to the ASHRAE adaptive comfort model
No full textThe assessment of local and short-term thermal discomfort in buildings has been widely investigated, and different metrics are available in the literature to predict the likelihood of dissatisfied people. These metrics are named right-here and right-now discomfort indexes and constitute the basis for evaluating long-term thermal comfort conditions in buildings. Well-known examples are the Predicted Percentage of Dissatisfied (PPD) part of the Fanger comfort model included in the ISO standard 7730 and the Overheating risk index (NaOR), built upon the EN adaptive thermal comfort model. This study proposes a new index for use with the ASHRAE adaptive thermal comfort model to fill a gap in the literature and standard. It is called the ASHRAE Likelihood of Dissatisfaction (ALD) and is obtained from a logistic regression of the right-here and right-now thermal comfort field data contained in the 1990s ASHRAE RP-884 database. The recent release of another, more extensive database of thermal comfort field studies, the ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort Database II, provides an opportunity to validate ALD with an independent dataset and assess its generalisability. The successful external validation of ALD and its agreement with NaOR give support to the reliability of the novel right-here and right-now index and open to the possibility to use it for assessing short-term thermal comfort conditions in buildings, calculating long-term thermal comfort indices based on the ASHRAE adaptive model, optimising both the design of new buildings and renovations and for assessing the operational thermal comfort performance of existing buildings
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