1,720,984 research outputs found
A multilevel method to assess and design the renovation and integration of Smart Cities
No full textContemporary cities are the scenes of sudden and numerous changes from social, economical and environmental points of view. The capability for cities to endorse, foster, enhance ongoing transformations and modern challenges is obstructed by the unsuitableness and lack of communication and integration of both material and immaterial infrastructures. The new vision of Smart Cities can fill these gaps, as it represents a balance among hardware and software aspects, technology and human capital, and it aims at realizing and guaranteeing the quality of life to the inhabitants. At today, there is absence of uniformity both in the definition and in the concept development of a Smart City, and there are not practical methodologies supporting the evaluation models developed in literature. The approach often does not appear as a holistic, complete and integrated, but as a combination of sector-based non communicating and non integrated actions. In this framework, the aim of this paper is to outline a planning methodology of actions to realize a Smart City that provides a holistic and specific approach to territories and cities by taking into account the specific features of the context and by developing different and appropriate strategies. According to this, a way to integrate the various aspects of a Smart City through the definition of the relations existing among all the subsystems of the city, considered as a whole (human) organism, has been developed. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Lighting Design for Plant Growth and Human Comfort
No full textPlants have several positive effects on humans validating their use in interior spaces. In addition to their pleasantness, the enhancement of human psychological wellbeing and the improvement of environmental parameters are two favourable aspects. Light is a vital element, used by plants for photosynthesis and morphogenesis and by human being for vision and for the regulation of the circadian rhythms, but they need different lighting conditions in quantity as well as in quality. Usually the human-being oriented lighting design for interiors only guarantees the survival of plants as it is inadequate for their proper growth and development. The aim of this paper is to develop an approach to interior lighting design suitable both for humans and plants in terms of quality of light and physiological requirements. The hall of a museum was introduced as a virtual experimental setting, testing the positive impact of new lighting technologies
A step towards the optimization of the indoor luminous environment by genetic algorithms
No full textBuildings are heavily responsible for energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Increasing their energy efficiency is in the direction of the EU strategies; and this is consistent with EU Energy Performance of
buildings Directive (EPBD 2010/31/EU), 2010. In this view the design and management of daylight and artificial light can play a fundamental role. In this paper, a method to optimize indoor lighting design from energy efficiency, economic and environmental viewpoints is presented. The optimization was developed through the Genetic Algorithms technique and the optimal layout in terms of number, location and mounting heights of luminaires in a generic office room was evaluated. Solutions with different types of light sources, nominal luminous flux and photometric distribution curves were compared and the cost effectiveness of these alternatives was also considered. The systems resulting from the optimization show increased uniformity of illuminance, a reduction of the number of luminaires and a decrease of the maximum UGR values, proving the effectiveness of the technique in the lighting design field. Results show that current methods for lighting design can still be improved to achieve optimal configurations in terms of energy efficiency and cost effectiveness
From Efficient to Sustainable and Zero Energy Consumption Buildings: Green Buildings Rating Systems
No full textHome smart grid device for energy saves and failure monitoring
No full texthome smart grid device for energy saves and failure monitoThe growing sensibility on energy consumption has focused people interest in energy optimization technologies. Non-intrusive load monitoring system (NILMS) are a cheap solution that require minimal equipment and installation time. The aim of the research is to develop a load analyzing platform for electrical devices to obtain information on their functionality and to display the costumer advantage to change their energy class. It monitors malfunctions or non-critical failures in realtime. It also counts the device operative life-time. The architecture is made of a local analysis electrical plug, which get the load information, and a central unit which elaborates data. The hardware implements a hall-effect ammeter, a power transformer and a micro controller (AT-mega328). The central unit is a small integrated computer (Raspberry). The communication between the devices utilize a low-range radio transmitter.rin
Studio dell'uso del colore come materiale progettuale per la crescita psicopedagogica del bambino
No full textThe pedestrian's perspective: How do illuminance variations affect reassurance?
No full textThe Economist Intelligence Unit Safe Cities Index summarizes the primary issues of Safety as being digital security, health security, infrastructure safety and personal safety. The biggest challenge for cities is to identify all the issues that actually impact on public safety and comprehend the real perceptions - or misconceptions - that citizens may have. Reassurance describes the confidence a pedestrian might gain from road lighting (and other factors) to walk along a footpath or road after dark, and is intended to describe both perceived safety and fear of crime. Past studies have demonstrated that the presence, level and quality of lighting affect human perception of safety. This article describes a field survey of reassurance carried out in Rome to investigate methods for measuring how changes in illuminance affect reassurance. These results confirm that the reassurance of participants can be put in relation with street lighting since changes in illuminance levels were highly perceived by test participants. It was also found that reassurance is more related to the mean horizontal illuminance than to the minimum illuminance or minimum/average uniformity
A territorial based strategy for the distribution of sensor networks in smart cities
No full textNowadays land governance has to keep up with sudden environmental and social transformations of cities. Therefore it is necessary to improve the exchange of real-time information among different stakeholders. One of the solutions is to acquire data not only by Remote Sensing, but also by sensor networks distributed on the territory. In this way information are developed with multiple connections and a smarter management of cities can be achieved. However there are not strategies for the distribution of the sensors yet and it often takes to an excess of not interrelated data. Therefore it is important to design the networks according to the features of the territory in which they are distributed. This aim can be achieved with the study of infrastructural, cultural and functional aspects of the cities. The goal of this paper is to define a method to plan an optimized distribution of sensors in the city based on the analysis of characteristics and relations among urban zones
Influence of insulating materials on green building rating system results
Full text linkThis paper analyzes the impact of a change in the thermal insulating material on both the energy and environmental performance of a building, evaluated through two different green building assessment methods: Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and Istituto per l'innovazione e Trasparenza degli Appalti e la Compatibilità Ambientale (ITACA). LEED is one of the most qualified rating systems at an international level; it assesses building sustainability thanks to a point-based system where credits are divided into six different categories. One of these is fully related to building materials. The ITACA procedure derives from the international evaluation system Sustainable Building Tool (SBTool), modified according to the Italian context. In the region of Umbria, ITACA certification is composed of 20 technical sheets, which are classified into five macro-areas. The analysis was developed on a residential building located in the central Italy. It was built taking into account the principles of sustainability as far as both structural and technical solutions are concerned. In order to evaluate the influence of thermal insulating material, different configurations of the envelope were considered, replacing the original material (glass wool) with a synthetic one (expanded polystyrene, EPS) and two natural materials (wood fiber and kenaf). The study aims to highlight how the materials characteristics can affect building energy and environmental performance and to point out the different approaches of the analyzed protocols
Computational fluid dynamic modelling of thermal periodic stabilized regime in passive buildings
Full text linkThe influence of the architectural envelope on indoor microclimate conditions has been widely studied in recent years because of the optimization of passive strategies and thermal performances of buildings. In this study a transient periodic temperature has been imposed on a side wall of an enclosure: the variation of the temperature in all the points of the body follows the same periodic law of the imposed thermal forcing after a certain time. This condition is called periodic stabilized regime. This phenomenon happens especially during the summer season when the daily temperature has very different values between day and night. Despite that, nowadays building microclimatic conditions are analyzed imposing a fixed temperature on the indoor environment. There are not analytical and numerical solutions describing the case of a temperature free to evolve under an outdoor thermal forcing. This situation finds a practical example in passive buildings where there are no HVAC systems or equipment. Periodic stabilized regime has been analyzed imposing different material properties on the solid body of the enclosure. Conductive and convective phenomena have been numerically investigated through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and analytically validated using a function that reproduces the daily variation of the outdoor temperature. The aim of this paper is to supply the basis to build a predictive tool able to simulate the indoor thermal profile of an environment subjected to outdoor thermal conditions also in the case where the indoor temperature is free to evolve
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