Showing papers in "Energy and Buildings in 2010"

TL;DR: In this article, a critical review of the life cycle energy analyses of buildings resulting from 73 cases across 13 countries is presented, including both residential and office buildings, and it is observed that low energy buildings perform better than self-sufficient (zero operating energy) buildings in the life-cycle context.

TL;DR: In this paper, a high-resolution model of domestic electricity use is presented based upon a combination of patterns of active occupancy (i.e. when people are at home and awake), and daily activity profiles that characterise how people spend their time performing certain activities.

TL;DR: In this paper, a state-of-the-art review is given on the knowledge of phase change materials (PCMs) today for building applications, and the authors propose a solution for reducing the energy consumption of buildings.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reviewed the current literature and highlighted the situations in which the greatest building energy savings can be made and found that older buildings with poor existing insulation are deemed to benefit most from a green roof as current building regulations require such high levels of insulation that green roofs are seen to hardly affect annual building energy consumption.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the analysis of existing literature in order to identify differing parameters so that development of a consistent and comparable database can be facilitated, and propose a template, standard or protocol regarding embodied energy computations that could address these problems.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that more energy is used during non-working hours (56%) than during working hours (44%). This arises largely from occupants' behaviour of leaving lights and equipment on at the end of the day, and partly due to poor zoning and controls.

TL;DR: In this article, a detailed Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been conducted on a low energy family house recently built in Northern Italy, which was claimed to be sustainable on the basis of its outstanding energy saving performances, an ex post LCA was set up to understand whether, and to what extent, the positive judgement could be confirmed in a life cycle perspective.

TL;DR: The results demonstrate that the use of decision tree method can classify and predict building energy demand levels accurately, identify and rank significant factors of building EUI automatically, and provide the combination of significant factors as well as the threshold values that will lead to high building energy performance.

TL;DR: In this paper, the results of an experimental set-up to test phase change materials with two typical construction materials (conventional and alveolar brick) for Mediterranean construction in real conditions were presented.

TL;DR: In this article, the concept of net energy is introduced and applied within the built environment, based on a methodology accounting for the embodied energy of building components together with energy use in operation, and a definition of life cycle zero energy buildings (LC-ZEB) is proposed, as well as the use of the net energy ratio as a factor to aid in building design with a life cycle perspective.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the space heating demand of residential buildings can be decreased by improved insulation, reduced air leakage and by heat recovery from ventilation air, however, these measures result in an increa...

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate life-cycle energy savings, carbon emission reduction, and cost-effectiveness of energy efficiency measures in new commercial buildings using an integrated design approach, and estimate the implications from a cost on energy-based carbon emissions.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an accepted and refereed manuscript to the article, post-print, published with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License.

TL;DR: In this paper, the life cycle primary energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission of an eight-storey wood-framed apartment building were analyzed, including acquisition and processing of materials, on-site construction, building operation, demolition and materials disposal.

TL;DR: In this article, a distributed MPC algorithm with one information exchange per time step is proposed with good control performances and low computational requirements for thermal regulation in buildings, which exploits the intermittently operating mode of almost all types of buildings.

TL;DR: In this paper, an integrated decision support system was developed to assess existing office building conditions and to recommend an optimal set of sustainable renovation actions, considering trade-offs between renovation cost, improved building quality, and environmental impacts.

TL;DR: In this paper, a dew point evaporative cooling system for sensible cooling of the ventilation air for air conditioning application was constructed and experiments were carried out to investigate the outlet air conditions and the system effectiveness at different inlet air conditions (temperature, humidity and velocity) covering dry, temperate and humid climates.

TL;DR: A large-scale wireless and wired environmental sensor network test-bed and its application to occupancy detection in an open-plan office building and final results indicate that there are significant correlations between measured environmental conditions and occupancy status.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a simple methodology to estimate hourly electrical and fuel energy consumption of a building by applying a series of predetermined coefficients to the monthly energy consumption data from electricity and fuel utility bills.

TL;DR: In this article, the effect of board density, fiber moisture content (MC) and pressing time on thermal conductivity and mechanical properties of BCSF was investigated, and the results showed that the board with a density of 150-450 kg/m3 had the thermal conductivities values ranging from 0.0585 to 0.0815 W/mK, which was close to that of the expanded perlite and vermiculite within the same density range.

TL;DR: In this article, a simple, practical and comprehensive assessment of battery energy storage technologies for small-scale renewable applications based on their technical merit and economic feasibility is presented, and a modelling framework to quantify the associated benefits of renewable resource integration is provided.

TL;DR: In this article, a field study in naturally ventilated apartments was done in 2008, during the summer and monsoon seasons in Hyderabad in composite climate, where over 100 subjects, giving 3962 datasets, were analysed under different groups: age, gender, economic group and tenure.

TL;DR: In this paper, a transient and implicit model based on computational fluid dynamics was developed to predict the thermal performance and cooling capacity of earth-air-pipe heat exchanger systems, which was validated against experimental investigations on an experimental set-up in Ajmer (Western India). Good agreement between simulated results and experimental data is obtained.

TL;DR: In this article, a comparison of three typical insulation materials, polyurethane, polystyrene, and mineral wool, was performed in four house-like cubicles and their thermal performance throughout the time was measured.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors evaluated the behavioral impact of providing building occupants with personal electricity utilization data contextualized with different social frames of reference and found that the only group that significantly reduced their electricity use when compared to the control group was the study group that could view peer network utilization.

TL;DR: In this paper, a typology of buildings representative of the building stock for the EU-25 was developed characterizing 72 building types in terms of their representativity, geographical distribution, size, material composition, and thermal insulation.

TL;DR: In this paper, an approach to categorizing distinct vernacular regions and evaluating energy performance of ancient homes as well as identifying optimal constructions using traditional building techniques was introduced, where the authors conducted an extensive computer energy modeling for a number of representative ancient vernautical architectural characteristics observed for different climatic regions.

TL;DR: In this paper, two typical micro combined heat and power (CHP) alternatives, namely, gas engine and fuel cell for residential buildings, are analyzed and two different operating modes including minimum-cost operation and minimum-emission operation are taken into consideration by employing a plan and evaluation model for residential micro CHP systems.

TL;DR: In this article, the thermal performance of cool colored acrylic paints containing infrared reflective pigments in comparison to conventional coloured acrylic paints of similar colors (white, brown and yellow) applied on sheets of corrugated fiber cement roofing was investigated.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors quantified the uncertainty that can be expected in the thermal conductivity of insulation materials in the lack of specific experimental measurements, and proposed conductivities for specific materials and for groups of materials, in order to consider situations in which the material under consideration is not well defined.