Conference Agenda

Due to the expectation of climate change and increasing global temperature, new building rates will face challenges. Nearly 40% of world-wide carbon emissions can be linked to building's energy consumption. Therefore, it is significant to understand how a building's energy consumption will behave under future climate change in order to reduce carbon emissions. The residential sector's demand for energy in the KSA is massive at 50%. Based on recent government initiatives of KSA, mandatory new residential buildings must meet stringent energy codes. This study investigates the effects of applying the new Saudi residential building energy codes for a detached single-family house (villa) located in Jeddah, KSA. This study aims to see how the code might perform under current and future climate change scenarios. Although the current code already shows a significant improvement in combating future climate change, a total reduction of 38% in the annual cooling demands of existing villas in Jeddah after applying the new standards will be illustrated. However, increases in cooling energy demand due to climate change still exist. Applying more passives strategies that are not included in the code would assist the researcher in knowing if there are other means to achieve significant decreases in cooling demand.

People in rural areas of Nepal have been using firewood for variety of household purposes. In this paper we analysed the firewood consumption patterns and their relationship with family size and the number of livestock rearing in the study area of Dhading district of Nepal. Investigation on periodic household firewood consumption was carried out for 24 hours for 16 households. Per-capita firewood consumption was found 639 kg/capita/year and average household firewood consumption was found 12.1 kg/family/day. We found household firewood consumption increases as increase in family size but per-capita firewood consumption decreases with increase in family size. Firewood consumption was also increased with the increase in the number of livestock reared. The rate of firewood combustion of small and big households was 1.28 kg/hour and 1.34 kg/hour respectively. Average time for firewood burning of households of small and big households was found 8.7 hours and 9.9 hours per day. Based on present information on the firewood consumption patterns of Dhading district, application of appropriate technologies for the improvements on traditional cooking stoves and improvements on the environmental and health condition of the rural people are to be done

With the aim of optimizing urban built environments in terms of potentially consumed and produced energy of buildings, a new methodological approach is proposed based on several urban typo-morphological archetypes. Given the complexity to obtain all their characteristics at integrating knowledge of urban planning professionals or architects in a co-design situation, both in terms of produced geometry and materials to be used, a hybrid tool with parametric modeling capabilities and operators on high-level geometric primitives is proposed inside a framework coupling all the tools necessary for energy optimization. It integrates a parametric urban morphology generator based on Rhinoceros/Grasshopper, an energetic assessments tool working at urban scale (Citysim) and a tool controlling the optimization process (ModeFrontier), which gives best urban form solutions using a multi-criteria analysis among best potential solutions inside the Pareto front. This approach appears to give an adapted way for integration of a high level of representation and knowledge on urban archetypes, thereby giving a way to deepen the exploration of new energy-optimized urban forms.

Building energy simulations carry out detailed calculations for energy prediction for each and every part of the building geometry. For the fenestrations, details about the glazing, the frame and the shading device are taken as simulation inputs. For the glazing part the typical inputs are the U-Value and the solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC) value for the glazing. Although the SHGC value is a standard value for a glazing type, there are different calculation methods to account for the impact of shading devices into the SHGC values. The impact of SHGC value through two different methods are studied in terms of solar gains (kWh) through fenestration and cooling energy. The results are also compared with the results of the simulation model in which the shading devices are modelled and the manufacturer’s SHGC value is considered instead of effective SHGC value. Further, the impact on cooling energy reduction is determined and compared for different latitudes, climates and overhang depth. The results show that the cooling energy reduction obtained from the methods with detailed heat transfer mechanisms are closer to the results obtained from the simulation with the physical shading device.