Conference Agenda

As urban populations are to increase by 2.6 billion by 2050, and the built environment accounts for over half global CO2 emissions, new methods are being investigated to reduce building energy use. Integrating plants into our built environment could help reduce temperatures and improve air quality, and thus reduce the need for ventilation, heating and air conditioning. Hydroponics allow to grow a high density of plants with little maintenance, weight and water use. The aim of this paper is to ascertain the potential advantages and viability of integrating numerous hydroponic modules in an office building. It presents in a first part the implementation of 50 hydroponic modules in an office building in Cambridge. The second part discusses the qualitative and quantitative monitoring of the impact of plants on the office. Finally, a model of interactions between the plants and the building environment is presented, and initial results of running a plant module in building energy simulation software TRNSYS are shown. Creating the model alongside the implementation project allowed to gain further insights into the impacts on environmental conditions, building energy use, and occupants of integrating a large density of plants into a building.

In buildings, coupling photovoltaic (PV) systems with electric storage (ES) enables to increase the building’s energy autonomy. However, if ES does extend the self-consumption of onsite renewable, it also increases the life cycle environmental impact of the stored energy. As a result, there is a threshold where the GHG emission benefits of using an ES starts to compensate its own embedded and operational impact. In this study, a methodology to assess this neutral global warming potential target of an ES is proposed and extended to the primary energy and its non-renewable part. The methodology is tested on a case study consisting of a feasibility project of a building located in Switzerland. When the surplus renewable energy that cannot be used directly neither stored onsite is exportable to the grid, the operational benefits of the ES cannot balance its embedded impact anymore. The neutral targets are greatly affected by the characteristics of the grid mix providing electricity to the building. While the mitigation of GHG emissions in buildings by the use of an ES may be efficient in countries like Germany that has a carbon-intensive mix, it might be technologically impossible with a low-carbon electricity provision, like in France for instance.

The concern about the increasing consumption related to heating, ventilation and air-conditioning applications in the residential sector, and the subsequent increase of the greenhouse gases emissions, has led to the search for solutions that can mitigate these adverse effects. Thermal energy storage with phase change materials is presented as an attractive solution because it allows storing large amounts of energy in small volumes; this solution can be adapted to meet the cooling and heating needs of a building. In this work, we detail the design, manufacture, and experimental tests of a prototype for an air-PCM unit, consisting of a tube bundle geometry. These tests were carried out on a plus energy house located in the South of France, during the summertime of 2017. Thermal performance was evaluated through indicators such as the indoor air temperature and the operating time of the unit. The results suggest that the air-PCM unit limits the indoor temperature rise during the unit operating time, keeping a temperature value around the upper thermal comfort limit.

An office building offers several opportunities to integrate Building integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) elements. Shading blinds form combines perfectly two functions: preventing part of the irradiation from reaching a glazed surface controlling the inner comfort conditions, as well as producing solar electricity. In regions where high irradiation is available and less demanding climates from the point of view of heating loads, this application is particularly advantageous for this kind of building. Nevertheless, at low latitudes locations, due to relative position of sun rays, the increasing effect of self-shading must be carefully analyzed - there is a delicate balance between optimal tilt angle and latitude to achieve a surface suited to integrate BIPV shadowing components. A methodology and practical results have been presented, easily possible to be used to design such devices in office buildings in Brazil, and, to a certain extent, in other countries at similar latitudes. Also, contribute to the further development of knowledge in this so far unexplored producing and saving energy saving strategy.

In the design practice simulation methods are already widely used to support the understanding of energy performance and to help designers in reducing energy demand during the design process. However, energy simulation tools are largely limited to the individual building level, and urban microclimate conditions and variations in local wind, solar radiation, and air temperature patterns in which buildings express their energy performance are largely overlooked. In order to include microclimatic data in the computation of space cooling and heating consumption and enlarge the scale of analysis from single buildings to district scale, a new simulation method has been developed. The proposed coupling procedure links the microclimate software ENVI-met and the City Energy Analyst energy simulation tool and it is employed in the energy assessment of a urban re-development project in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. The results show that, considering microclimatic boundary conditions, the average hourly energy loads vary for daytime and night-time peaks and moreover a variation can be noticed in terms of total space heating and cooling consumption on the hottest and coldest day of a typical year.

This paper focuses on the trends of 24/7 occupied IT offices in the Northern part of India. The rise of the IT Industry in India has resulted in an adaptation of the office spaces to the international trends of constructing glass box with deep plans and high glazing ratios coupled with aluminium composite panels with less considerations to the environmental and occupant needs. Such buildings are invariably dependant on air conditioning which results in huge energy expenditure. Fieldwork and Survey conducted for analysis illustrate the trends of the building typology which can be used as a basis for potential design solutions for IT offices being constructed in Delhi NCR by understanding the factors affecting the high energy demands and the spatial relationships.

This paper presents findings about interactions of occupants’ thermal feelings and adaptive actions within office buildings from a two-week longitudinal survey in Harbin, a north-east city in China with hot summers and severely cold winters. Measurements of the indoor and outdoor environmental changes and occupants’ window opening behaviours were conducted in six mixed-mode office rooms with fans or air conditioning cooling facilities. Thermal feelings and personal characteristics were gained via a panel questionnaire with 67 subjects from these offices to relate the thermal feeling with adaptions and physical conditions. The results showed the common use of the cooling device simultaneously with window opening behaviour, and an extremely high probability of window opening in office rooms with fans during the summer. Common patterns of the predictors for summer period in the severe cold area are identified in the analysis, while only gender for offices with fans and outdoor temperature, indoor and outdoor relative humidity for offices with air-conditioning were important variables in determining the state of the window opening. By comparing of the window opening changes with environmental factors for different thermal feelings, the mechanism of the interaction of occupant and offices building in summer season was further clarified.