1,720,976 research outputs found
Robust and resilient buildings: A framework for defining the protection against climate uncertainty
No full textThe design of high-performance buildings has been questioned for their actual performance in operation, where the impact of external perturbations such as occupant behavior and climate has proved to be prominent. These sources of variability, called aleatory uncertainties, are inherent variations of nondeterministic systems and are irreducible. Therefore, one of the main approaches to deal with these uncertainties is to consider them as noise during the design phase. The goal of the design is hence achieving a solution whose performance is least sensitive to the noise. This specific design process is called robust design. In this study, a prospect of climate conditions that a building might face during its lifespan is identified. However, although robust design can support the design of building variants whose performance is insensitive to typical climate conditions and also predictable extreme climate conditions, these building variants cannot be considered protected in case of unforeseeable extreme events. During such events, another property called resilience is required, which focuses on withstanding and recovering during and after the occurrence of the event. This study reviews the concepts of robustness and resilience and organizes them into a framework that clarifies their relationships in the protection of buildings against climate uncertainties
Critical Analysis of Software Tools Aimed at Generating Future Weather Files with a view to their use in Building Performance Simulation
Full text linkTwo software tools, namely CCWorldWeatherGen and WeatherShift (TM), are today available on the market and enable individual end-users, to generate future projection weather data that can be used for executing building performance simulation. These software tools have been developed based on different assumptions. Therefore, the outputs of the two tools were generated and compared both graphically and using statistical methods to get to a better understanding of their differences and, hence, to identify possible consequences when applied to building performance simulation. The results suggest that, depending on the purpose of the design, care should be taken in using the above-mentioned tools
Challenges in the Modeling and Simulation of Green Buildings
No full textGreen buildings are environmentally bearable and economically viable buildings that are designed, constructed, and operated in order to minimize their environmental impact on the planet and maximize the quality of human life. Achieving a green building is hence a wide, complex, and ambitious challenge that requires close cooperation of all the stakeholders involved in the life cycle of the building, multidisciplinary competencies and field experience, as well as extensive computational skills. In this last regard, building performance simulation, which is a computer-based and multidisciplinary mathematical model of given aspects of building performance, is emerging as a promising support for designers and consultants. Unfortunately, although building performance simulation is renowned to be a powerful, comprehensive, flexible, and scalable tool, its use is not trivial, and, even today, modelers have to face several challenges for employing it to support the design and operation of green buildings. In this chapter, the main features of green buildings will be, first, mentioned. Next, typical mistakes, errors, and uncertainties that can spoil a building model will be presented. Then, a few modeling and simulation challenges - ranging from the model creation, through modeling under aleatory uncertainty, quality assurance, tool integration, simulation-based optimization, visualization and communication issues, to the selection of an appropriate tool - will be presented. Finally, a few final conclusions and future directions are drawn
Energy retrofit for a climate resilient child care centre
No full textClimate scientists have developed and refined climate change models on a global scale. One of the aims of these models is to predict the effects of human activities on climate, and thus the delivery of information that is useful to devise mitigation actions. Moreover, if they can be properly downscaled to a regional and local level, they might be useful to deliver support for adaptation actions. For example, they may be used as an input for the better design of the features of buildings in order to make them resilient to climate modification, e.g., able to passively control heat flows to produce comfortable indoor conditions not only in the present climate, but also in future climate conditions. Taking into account the future weather scenarios that show an increase in the global temperature and climate severity, a likely consequence on building energy use will be a substantial shift from space heating to space cooling, and potentially uncomfortable thermal conditions during the summer will became a major challenge, both for new and existing buildings. In this paper, a deep energy retrofit of a child care centre located in Milan (Italy) is analysed on the basis of future weather scenarios; the analysis aims to identify to what extent choices that are made nowadays on the basis of a typical meteorological year may succeed to provide acceptable energy and indoor environmental performance throughout the future decades. The analysis confirms that climate change might require the installation of active cooling systems to compensate for harsher summer conditions over a long-term horizon, however, in the mid-term, passive cooling strategies combined with envelope refurbishment may still guarantee thermally comfortable conditions, and they will reduce energy cooling needs when active cooling is eventually installed
Energy retrofit of a day care center for current and future weather scenarios
Full text linkMany scientific evidences have shown that Earth's climate is rapidly changing. By 2050, European Union is aiming to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the building sector. Achieving this target might help the mitigation of global warming, but the climate change seems inevitable. This means that both new and refurbished buildings should be able to face those conditions that they are going to experience during their lifetime. Therefore, any building design should be checked both for current and future climate scenarios. This study describes the use of a downscaling method named morphing to generate future weather scenarios and intends to support the design process of a deep energy retrofit of a day care center in order to improve the energy and thermal comfort performance of the building under the current and future weather scenarios. The retrofit concept of the building also includes hybrid ventilation, automated solar shading, lighting controls and renewable energy generation systems
On the impact of stochastic modeling of occupant behavior on the energy use of office buildings
Full text linkThe reliability of building performance simulation is hindered by several uncertainties, with aleatory uncertainty due to occupant behavior being one of the most critical. The present study aims to assess the propagation of uncertainty due to the adoption of stochastic models for modeling Occupant Presence and Actions (OPAs) available in the literature on the annual electric energy use of a reference office building. To this purpose, a global sensitivity analysis was designed and carried out by analyzing model inputs and energy outputs of 144 permutations of 15 different stochastic models for OPAs for a total of 7200 simulations. Building energy use computed considering stochastic OPAs modeling resulted in being sensibly higher than the reference value estimated assuming scheduled occupancy and rule-based occupant's actions as suggested by reference standards. The median value of the electric energy use was 58.6% higher than the base case electric energy use. Furthermore, the stochastic models used to model window operation have the highest effect on energy output, followed by light switch-off, and occupancy models. Light switch-on models showed a lower influence on the overall building energy performance. Furthermore, the Generalized Estimating Equations method was adopted to assess the interdependence among stochastic models for OPA and showed that changing the stochastic model in window operation, occupancy estimation, and light switch-off behavior generates a considerable difference in building's energy performance. Contrariwise, the available stochastic models for light switch-on and blind operation perform quite similarly among each other and have a limited impact on a building's energy performance
The Sustainability Challenge: How Multi-Cultural And Interdisciplinary Groups Of Master Students Conceived Sustainable Architecture In Shanghai
No full textThe sustainability concept addresses complex anthropogenic challenges by soliciting approaches that are problem-driven and solution-oriented. What a ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ is, however, is not always clear, and must be negotiated on behalf of a multitude of interests and concerns. How does such a negotiation happen in an interdisciplinary and multi-cultural environment, and what does this negotiation process mean for the sustainable solutions that are attempted agreed on and achieved? In this paper we study the experiences made in an interdisciplinary and multi-cultural summer school on ‘Sustainable Energy in Cities’ held in Shanghai in July 2016 in order to say something about how sustainability was negotiated across different disciplines and cultural background. The summer school included 35 master’s students from eleven countries with mechanical and civil engineering, social science, industrial ecology, renewable energy and architectural disciplinary backgrounds. The students were divided into four groups with mixed disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, and with an equal gender proportion. Combining this heterogeneous set up with the experimental teaching method of ‘Experts in Team’, all groups dealt with the same task: designing a research facility for a small group of researchers based on pristine wetland islands in Pudong, Shanghai. This study aims to understand how the four groups faced this challenge by arguing that their design was sustainable. The observation was based on the following categories: the localization, visibility and impact, technological choices and which types of visualizations were chosen to communicate the design principles, the energy strategies and the social impacts
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
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