Showing papers in "Building and Environment in 2012"

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provided a comprehensive review of planning with urban greening and described parametric studies that have been conducted to investigate the preferred location, amount, and types of vegetation for urban planning.

TL;DR: In this article, a theoretical framework to deal with occupants' interactions with building controls, aimed at improving or maintaining the preferred indoor environmental conditions, is elaborated, which is used to look into the drivers for the actions taken by occupants (windows opening and closing) and investigate the existing models in literature of these actions for both residential and office buildings.

TL;DR: In this paper, a series of coupled 3D steady RANS simulations for a generic isolated building are validated based on detailed wind tunnel experiments with Particle Image Velocimetry, and the impact of a wide range of computational parameters is investigated, including the size of the computational domain, the resolution of computational grid, the inlet turbulent kinetic energy profile of the atmospheric boundary layer, the turbulence model, the order of the discretization schemes and the iterative convergence criteria.

TL;DR: In this article, the effects of classroom ventilation on pupils' performance were investigated in 8 primary schools in England, and the results of computerized performance tasks performed by more than 200 pupils showed significantly faster and more accurate responses for Choice Reaction (by 2.2%), Colour Word Vigilance (By 2.7%), Picture Memory (by 8%) and Word Recognition (by 15%) at the higher ventilation rates compared with the low ventilation conditions.

TL;DR: This study demonstrates that evidence of staff outcomes is scarce and insufficiently substantiated, and the implications of this review are relevant to the design and construction of HCF.

TL;DR: In this article, the link between building height and ground-level pollutants in street networks of high-rise urban areas has been investigated, and the results show that building height variab...

TL;DR: In this article, the procedure used to verify and validate the PCM model in EnergyPlus using a similar approach as dictated by ASHRAE Standard 140, which consists of analytical verification, comparative testing, and empirical validation.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the effectiveness of small urban rivers in reducing the urban heat island (UHI) effect and examined the role that the urban form on the banks of a river can play in propagating or reducing this potential cooling.

TL;DR: Why residential ventilation is an issue of concern in Europe and how is related to the human health is examined and a review of the current status of residential ventilation standards and regulations in Europe is provided, as a reference.

TL;DR: In this article, the application of reflective pavements in an urban park in the greater Athens area was investigated to improve thermal comfort conditions, reduce the intensity of heat island and improve the global environmental quality in the considered area.

TL;DR: In this article, a multi-objective optimization model based on harmony search algorithm (HS) is presented to minimize the life cycle cost (LCC) and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) emissions of the buildings.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the relationship between climate change and buildings and the emerging body of knowledge on the subject, as well as classifying and summarizing the contributions to this special issue.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors collected some pictures of indoor environmental conditions taken in seven primary schools near Venice (Italy, North-East) in springtime, while 614 children (age 9-11) completed a questionnaire about the evaluation of indoor environment conditions and the related psychological impact, their behaviour towards discomfort and if their level of interaction with the environment (opening a window, switching off a light etc.).

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the relationship between perceived building performance on specific Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) factors and occupants' overall satisfaction with their workspace and found that some IEQ factors had a predominantly negative impact on occupants overall satisfaction when the building underperformed.

TL;DR: In this paper, a simulation-based multi-objective optimization scheme (a combination of TRNSYS, GenOpt and a Tchebycheff optimization technique developed in MATLAB) is employed to optimize the retrofit cost, energy savings and thermal comfort of a residential building.

TL;DR: In this article, a controlled field survey was carried out to investigate the acceptable range of every individual environmental factor as well as the cumulative effects of multiple factors on indoor environmental quality, and the results showed that the satisfaction levels of both temperature and noise have one-vote veto power over the satisfaction level of the indoor environment as a whole.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluated the environmental benefits of green roofs by comparing emissions of NO2, SO2, O3 and PM10 in green roof material manufacturing process, such as polymers, with the green roof's pollution removal capacity.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present data on the size characterization concentration of PM 10, PM 5.0, PM 2.5 and PM 1.0 in Agra, India.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the results of a full life cycle assessment (LCA) study for the three most common types of house in the UK: detached, semi-detached and terraced.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the results of EnergyPlus dynamic thermal simulations of 3456 combinations of dwelling types and characteristics selected to represent the London domestic stock, showing that the insulation levels had considerable impact on indoor temperatures, with combined retrofitting of roof insulation and window upgrades reducing daytime living room temperatures during the warmest continuous 5-day period of modelling by, on average, 0.76 °C (%95C).

TL;DR: In this paper, a robust model of the building is obtained in two stages: first, physical knowledge is used to determine the structure of a low-order model, then least squares identification method is applied to find the numerical values of the model parameters.

TL;DR: In this article, a quantitative field study was applied to investigate outdoor thermal comfort conditions in hot and humid tropical climate of Malaysia, while the thermal perception of subjects was captured simultaneously using a questionnaire survey.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an extensive literature review in multiple fields and reasonable assumptions for unavailable data, based on which the Net Present Value (NPV) per unit of area of a green roof was assessed by considering the social cost benefits that green roofs generate over their lifecycle.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a tool used for the life cycle assessment of residential buildings located in three different European towns: Brussels (Belgium), Coimbra (Portugal) and Lulea (Sweden).

TL;DR: In this article, a multivariate linear regression model based on 27 building parameters relevant to the early design stages is proposed to quantify building energy performance in early design. But, the model is not suitable for the design of large buildings and is not robust to changes to high level design parameters.

TL;DR: This paper found that occupants with higher levels of environmental concern were more forgiving of their building, particularly those featuring aspects of green design, such as natural ventilation through operable windows, despite their criticisms of the building's indoor environmental quality, the green occupants were prepared to overlook and forgive less-than-ideal conditions more so than their brown occupants.

TL;DR: In this article, the daily and seasonal climatic behavior of various urban parks with different vegetation cover and its impact on human thermal sensation in the summer and winter in Tel Aviv, Israel was examined.

TL;DR: In this article, two typical thermal comfort models, the simple ISO 14505 standard method and the comprehensive UC Berkeley thermal comfort model (UCB model), were coupled to computational fluid dynamic (CFD) numerical simulation with different process to evaluate thermal environment of a small office.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the use of the downscaling method known as "morphing" to generate weather data files and assessed the impact of using these weather files on the energy performance of an actual NZEB.

TL;DR: This study adapts the κ–ω SST turbulence model to simulate air flow in urban areas and allows city planners and architects to improve building porosity efficiently for better pedestrian-level urban ventilation, without losing land use efficacy.