Conference Agenda

The objective of this study is to investigate the urban wind power potential from the proper arrangement of high-rise buildings in a complex and dense urban environment. There is great prospective in the formulation of the building design at early stages to maximize wind power production in dense urban areas. We employed the 3D steady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to investigate the impact of the arrangement of high-rise buildings on the wind energy potential . Two arrays of high-rise buildings with height = 90 m and aspect ratio (height/width) of 4.5 is studied, which focuses on different distances between the side façades of the upstream buildings, ranging from 3 to 21 m. The findings of the study support the high-rise buildings design with respect to integrated urban wind energy harvesting and the concept of sustainable urban development.

As one part of a three years project, this study was the test of a research procedure that will be applied to older occupants in care homes in the future research. It aims to investigate the feasibility of using Transepidermal Water Loss (TEWL) to measure the effect of dry air on occupant’s skin condition and hygrothermal comfort in a real living environment. 9 young adults participated in the 4-week study. Domestic humidifiers were used in each room to alter room humidity under a sequence of interventions. Data was collected under the circumstance of no interferences to occupants’ daily life. The collected data includes room temperature, relative humidity (RH) and TEWL on front arm. Results show that the measured TEWL was not significantly correlated to room RH due to inappropriate research procedure. Room humidity was effectively altered to 40% RH through the domestic humidifier used.

This study aimed to quantify the embodied energy of economic and socialized housing units in Davao City, Philippines and listed down the construction materials that contributed significantly to the total embodied energy and at the same time correlated these materials to the embodied energy. Embodied energy coefficients of construction materials were sourced out from existing literatures since there were no available standards and studies conducted or published in the context of the Philippines. A bill of materials/quantities was prepared for each housing unit in order to compute the embodied energy. The research findings showed that an average of 9,477.74 MJ/m2 of embodied energy was computed among the housing units. The results also showed that building materials such as cement, reinforcing bars (steel), gravel, and sand, have significant positive correlation with the embodied energy alongside the house unit floor area. The result further showed that the embodied energy measured per square meter (MJ/m2) was higher compared to the existing and published studies conducted. Implications to housing delivery were also pointed out for policy-making which could be adopted by the housing authority.

This paper aims to reveal the detailed household energy consumption patterns in four major cities of Indonesia and Malaysia. A total of 1,437 households of landed houses and apartments were surveyed during 2010-2014. The detailed household appliances and gas consumption were investigated through face-to-face interviews and measurement. The results showed that overall, annual average energy consumption in landed houses (15-28 GJ) is about 1.3-2.3 times larger than those in apartments (12-14 GJ). The energy consumption for cooking accounts for the largest proportion in all the case studies, ranging from 29% to 66% of the total. The energy consumption for cooling include those for AC and fans and they account for 21% to 22% on average in Jakarta and Johor Bahru respectively. The profiles of CO2 emissions were similar with those of energy. The factors affecting household energy consumption for cooling energy are also discussed.