The past decade has witnessed a lot of technological advancement towards the use of renewable and sustainable energy resources, these efforts are geared towards mitigating the effect of climate change and to make our environment safe and habitable. Today, buildings account for over 40 % of the world's total energy consumption. Thermal energy storage in buildings contributes significantly to the reduction

This paper presents the findings of a field research on occupant comfort with radiant ceiling cooling and overhead dedicated outdoor air system. This extends a previous thermal comfort study with radiant cooling and intended to investigate the actual occupant thermal comfort with radiant ceiling cooling and overhead air distribution system. The research is based on a revised ASHRAE RP-921 project protocol

Urban overheating affects the energy, health, power, survivability and environmental quality of cities. We calculated the magnitude of overheating in Sydney, Australia, at close to 9°C, which causes a cooling penalty of up to 16% and an increase in the indoor overheating levels of up to 56%. We developed and evaluated eight heat mitigation scenarios based on the use of reflective surfaces, additional

The industrial and building sector demands the largest proportion of global energy, therefore adopting energy efficiency related strategies, optimization techniques and management is an important step towards global energy reduction. The use of machine learning techniques in energy forecasting is gaining popularity due to their ability to solve complex non-linear problems, however this is predominately

One of the ways to increase the efficiency of energy conversion and reduce the generation of pollutants in the building sector is using combined cooling, heating and power (CCHP) systems. These systems have different types of prime movers such as micro gas turbine (MGT). In this study, a novel CCHP system based on the prime mover of hybrid solar micro turbine have been simulated and the annual performance

In most of the countries, buildings are often one of the major energy consumers, leading to the necessity of achieving sustainable building designs, and to the mandatory use of building performance simulation (BPS) tools in order to retrofit or design new energy efficient buildings. In the last years, the use of artificial neural networks (ANNs) metamodels has increased and gained confidence in BPS

Photovoltaic (PV) energy is a promising source of clean energy that can contribute to the development of sustainable cities and the mitigation of global warming. Conventionally, PV modules were only considered for installation on the rooftop of buildings. However, nowadays there are various types of PV modules that can be installed on different surfaces of buildings, such as curtain walls, windows

With increasing global warming, a method to identify individual heat exposure risk and conduct interventions is essential, in order to mitigate impacts of extreme climates on people's health. This paper aims to examine the differences of individual's physiological response in hot environments and consequently proposes a personal-based method to identify potentially vulnerable populations with high

In this paper, the design and implementation process of an artificial neural network based predictor to forecast a day ahead of the power consumption of a building HVAC system is presented. The featured HVAC system is situated at MagicBox, a real self-sufficient solar house with a monitoring system. Day ahead prediction of HVAC power consumption will remarkably enhance the Demand Side Management techniques

Building electric energy consumption forecasting is essential in establishing an energy operation strategy for building energy management systems. Because of recent developments of artificial intelligence hardware, deep neural network (DNN)-based electric energy consumption forecasting models yield excellent performances. However, constructing an optimal forecasting model using DNNs is difficult and

Climatic zoning is an important tool in building energy policy and regulations, smaller and more homogeneous climate zones could help enhance the rationality of energy policymaking. In most countries, climate zoning is based on simplified climate models, and it is difficult to accurately represent the energy demand characteristics of buildings. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel climate subdivision

Aged population is growing rapidly and aging in place is the major endowment pattern for older people. This study focused on the thermal living environments and thermal comfort of older people in their own homes. Special attention was paid to their behavioral adjustment characteristics. The longitudinal investigation was conducted from March 2018 to March 2019 in a residential community in Beijing

The purpose of this study was to investigate how internal convection in loose-fill insulations affects the insulation properties of highly insulated roof structures. This study consists of laboratory measurements of roof structures insulated by two different blown-in insulations. The measurements are repeated with two temperature differences and air velocities for 300 mm and 600 mm thick insulation

This research focused on adaptive thermal comfort in homes for older people in the hot summer and cold winter climate zone of China. A field study was conducted throughout the four seasons beginning in January 2014 and ending in April 2017 in Shanghai, China. The survey included simultaneous measurements of outdoor and indoor environmental parameters and an assessment of the participants’ sensations

This paper evaluated lignocellulosic biomass volume, in net and gross forms, consumed by Brazilian wood-based housing producers by building technique, as well as net volumes of fixed carbon and carbon dioxide by built area. Net volumetric values of consumed wood per available technique were obtained for single-storey house with 100 m2 of built area, whose data collection was supported by face-to-face

Nowadays identifying techniques aimed at a rational use of electric power has become even more important than the production of energy itself. This is caused by different factors, as the progressive saturation of the electricity grid, which is increasingly subject to connection requests, mainly due to the development of plants which exploit renewable energy sources. This work suggests a new approach

Optimal energy consumption is one of the sustainable development issues in many countries to improve the economic and environmental indices in the energy sector. This paper presents a tri-objective optimal performance of a smart hybrid energy system (SHES) in the presence of customer's participation to optimally reshape the demand profile in the day-ahead energy market. Minimizing the operation costs

A large amount of Brazilian electricity consumption is building related, and mainly consumed by air-conditioning systems due to the warm tropical weather; therefore, geothermal energy piles integrated with heat pump seem to be an interesting alternative for the building cooling demand in this country. Tropical residual soils in unsaturated condition cover a significant part of the Brazilian territory

Three main groups of internal and external influencing factors have been identified through this review, including building characteristics, equipment and technologies, and occupant's behaviors. The consideration of only building characteristics cannot guarantee the best energy design of a building, as it could be dependent on the other two groups of factors. Under some circumstances, some of the energy

Thermal comfort evaluations in the built environment are essential to occupant's satisfaction and also building energy consumption. Traditionally, thermal comfort has been assessed by Fanger's PMV model that was developed based on extensive laboratory tests. However, it's been found that PMV predictions are not good in field studies, especially in buildings with natural ventilation. In this paper,

An adaptive thermal comfort study was carried for assessing the thermal comfort requirements of students working in naturally ventilated (NV) university workshop building in the composite climate of India over two seasons (Autumn and Winter). 1332 complete surveys, 516 and 816 from autumn and winter season, respectively were collected and analyzed. A maximum of 70% of subjects were found voting comfortable

Passive houses linked to more efficient heating and cooling technologies have been one of the focus in last years. However, to close the loop of the building sector, there is still one open source: wasted heat from grey water. This paper addresses the potentiality of the wasted heat from grey water as a heat source to produce domestic hot water (DHW) based on a heat pump system (HP). A heat pump optimized

In urbanization, prefab buildings for office use are extensively applied on construction sites due to its convenience and flexibility. In order to study the adaptive thermal comfort in prefab construction site offices (PCSO),combined thermal parameter measurement and questionnaire survey were conducted on selected construction sites in Guangzhou during summer and winter seasons. 1179 valid questionnaires

Building Energy Model (BEM) calibration is the process of reducing the gap between the simulation outputs and the actual measured data at the same conditions. The literature shows that BEM calibration approaches could lead to a significant error in the model inputs even the calibration has been conducted successfully based on the model outputs (i.e., error functions). This paper compares the performance

Nowadays, as the role of energy retrofit on the existing building stock is recognized towards energy savings and emissions’ reductions, the actions to be undertaken towards this aim require complex decisions, in terms of the choice among active and passive strategies and among often conflicting objectives of the retrofit. Depending on the actor of the retrofit (e.g., private, public), the main objective

Existing pre-cooling strategies provide a means of shifting or reducing the peak demand and/or energy cost in residential buildings. However, majority of them are rule-based and therefore may not be optimal in terms of cost saving, leaving room for improvement. In this paper, an integer linear programming problem that accounts for the thermal properties of a specific home, HVAC system capacity, utility

There is a need to improve the understanding and the knowledge of energy efficiency measures for residential buildings in sub-Arctic climate regions. This paper presents an investigation of two identical multi-family residential buildings in the sub-Arctic climate of northern Sweden, before and after renovation. During the renovation, additional insulation of the external walls and new windows were

Lighting control in office buildings is driven by occupant's demand for indoor light environment. The control behavior not only has a direct impact on occupants’ visual comfort, but also relates with the building lighting energy consumption. However, due to the effect of glare, lighting control is often associated with shading adjustment. In this regard, this paper proposed a prediction model which

Many utility companies have installed Smart Meters (SMs) for residential and commercial buildings in the U.S., which are the part of the Smart Grid (SG) that integrates the electricity grid with communication networks. Along with the growing interest in SMs, the development of the wireless technologies and smart phones has accelerated the applications of Home Automation Devices (HADs) that can also

The human dimension information is crucial for efficient building energy saving, health and productivity, comfort conditions and security management. A great number of studies have been developed for occupancy information measurement. However, existing review work has limited coverage on emerging images/videos based methods. In this paper, many occupancy measurement systems based on different sensors

Developing advanced fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) techniques for building chillers is becoming increasingly essential for building energy saving. Previous FDD studies have mainly concentrated on the model performance, while fewer studies have examined the chiller fault action mechanism. This paper, therefore, proposes a method that can conduct both fault diagnosis and fault action mechanism explanation

Water source heat pump systems are widely used for cooling and heating due to high efficiency. The energy source can be surface water or underground water. Accurate modeling of water source heat pump systems is the basis for performance prediction, design and control optimization. However, various heat pump models are available to predict the system performance and results obtained can be very different

An integrated urban platform is the essential software infrastructure for smart, sustainable and resilient city planning, operation and maintenance. Today such platforms are mostly designed to handle and analyze large and heterogeneous urban data sets from very different domains. Modeling and optimization functionalities are usually not part of the software concepts. However, such functionalities are

This work aims to study the thermal-hydrodynamic performance of innovative multi tubes in tube helically coiled (MTTHC) heat exchanger used in the heat pump system. The 3D finite volume method and realizable k-ε turbulence model is considered to investigate the mechanism of flow and heat transfer in this MTTHC heat exchanger with the different coiled diameter and coiled pitch. Predicted values of pressure

In the energy simulation of buildings there has been little focus on their impact on the microclimate; simulation tools have usually dealt either with building or with outdoor simulation, and only recently these aspects are being interconnected. Within this framework, the paper describes a novel simulation workflow developed in the Grasshopper environment, where the Ladybug Tools are used to model

Thermal comfort research has been traditionally based on cross-sectional studies and spatial aggregation of individual surveys at building level. This research design is susceptible to compositional effects and may lead to error in identifying predictors to thermal comfort indices, in particular in relation to adaptive mechanisms. A relationship between comfort and different predictors can be true

During the defrosting process of an air source heat pump with vapor injection (ASHPVI), the defrosting duration lasts rather long due to shortage of heat sources for defrost. In theory, vapor injection during defrosting can shorten defrosting duration due to the increase of discharge refrigerant and power input of compressor. However, the injection electronic expansion valve is always turned off during

Improving the energy efficiency of the buildings is a worldwide hot topic nowadays. To assist comprehensive analysis and smart management, high-quality historical data records of the energy consumption is one of the key bases. However, the energy data records in the real world always contain different kinds of problems. The most common problem is missing data. It is also one of the most frequently

This study presents the flow of cooling air in a single rack data centre test bench with 40 servers with cold/hot aisle containment and a raised floor with a floor tile. The inhomogeneous pressure and velocity field in the cold aisle and the effect on the local server fan power were assessed. Computational fluid dynamic simulations as well as measurements were performed. Due to the cold/hot aisle containment

To improve the energy performance of existing buildings, retrofits may improve the energy efficiency or decrease energy demand. Many studies have been conducted on passive retrofit systems using phase change materials (PCMs). In this study, the objective is to analyze the energy performance and thermal comfort of an educational building with a shading system in South Korea. When PCMs were applied to

Alongside a mean global rise in temperature, climate change predictions point to an increase in heat waves and an associated rise in heat-related mortality. This suggests a growing need to ensure buildings are resilient to such events. Unfortunately, there is no agreed way of doing this, and no standard set of heatwaves for scientists or engineers to use. In addition, in all cases, heat waves are defined

Energy conservation measures (ECM) through awareness, good housekeeping measures and demand side management are the first step that must be implemented to achieve energy savings in any building. The energy savings from the implemented ECM must be properly quantified to demonstrate its effectiveness and success.Quantifying energy savings using Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) model have been gaining

Thermochromic coatings are promising in lowering air conditioning energy consumption of buildings. In this paper, thermochromic coatings with five different colors are prepared and their optical properties are measured. A two-story office building model is established and simulation is conducted to evaluate the energy performance of thermochromic coatings by using a three-step control method based

The Ordinary Least Square (OLS) method is often used in the estimation of buildings’ airtightness. However, recent research demonstrated that this regression technique neglects a significant part of uncertainty. This paper investigates two alternative methods: Weighted Line of Organic Correlation (WLOC) and Iterative Weighted Least Square (IWLS). A series of 30 repeated tests were performed on a newly-constructed

An overview of current status of the available literature on Life Cycle Energy, Life Cycle Greenhouse Gases, and Conventional Life Cycle Assessment of commercial and residential buildings was presented with respect to their height. A narrative literature review was carried out to provide a comprehensive overview as well as to highlight the recent contributions related to the environmental evaluation

Underground spaces have received increasing attention in the past decades owing to the growing urban land scarcity. Underground spaces can have a variety of functions such as storage, shelter, and civic infrastructures, while underground buildings for human activities have gained less attention mostly due to the challenges in creating suitable living and working environments. With the attempt to design

In this work, a complete process for preparation of SiO2/Cs0.32WO3 composite coatings with superhydrophobic and NIR shielding properties has been proposed. Combined nano-porous SiO2 with the spectral selective Cs0.32WO3, the composite coating could not only show excellent heat blocking property but also possess self-cleaning performance. In the simulated contaminant experiment, almost all of dust particles

The current study reports on strategies for improving the microclimate and thermal comfort modification effect of urban green spaces in the hot-summer and cold-winter zone. A classical Chinese garden (Lingering Garden) located south of the Yangtze River, China was selected as the study area. The microclimate parameters of the garden, including air temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed, as

With the development in information technologies, today's building energy consumption can be well monitored by the building energy management systems. However, in most real applications there is no clear definition of abnormal building energy consumption. To overcome this limitation, this work proposes a novel deep learning based unsupervised anomaly detection framework that includes recurrent neural

An improved thermal response test method called the stratified thermal response test (STRT) was proposed and a corresponding system was developed in this study. The difference between the STRT and other methods is that the temperature was measured by sensors placed inside the borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) at different depths to obtain the virtual thermal conductivity in each stratum. The method was

This paper explores the impact of natural ventilation on the indoor thermal environment through an extensive field survey of educational architecture in Cyprus performed both during the winter and summer periods. The study included seasonal indoor and outdoor monitoring of physical parameters, as well as a questionnaire-based survey. The study shows that the naturally ventilated spaces on the upper

Domestic demand-side response (DSR) involves having householders shift energy-consumptive behaviours forwards or backwards in time to avoid peak-demand periods. Time of Use tariffs, which vary the cost of energy depending on when it is used, are a proposed mechanism for DSR. However, we do not know which behaviours, if any, are amenable to being brought forward or postponed, nor what information people

This editorial paper aims to present a retrospective organized analysis of the research papers published in this special issue. This editorial aims to organize current researches on super insulating materials for high-performance buildings. Published papers are categorized into five categories, new material developments, durability and ageing, new measurement techniques and technologies, application

This paper presents a phase change material enhanced ventilated window (PCMVW) for both ventilation pre-cooling and pre-heating purposes. The PCM heat exchanger is used as a heat sink in the ventilation pre-cooling application and thermal energy storage in the ventilation pre-heating application. The paper presents a night cooling experiment and a solar energy storage experiment in order to investigate

Households’ heating energy consumption is one of the most important sources of a nation's total CO2 emissions. But there remains uncertainty about the impact of occupant behaviour on heating energy consumption, especially in multi-apartment buildings. In bringing together apartment specific data of occupant behaviour and physical building properties of multi-apartment buildings, the quantitative influence