Climate change future proofing of buildings—Generation and assessment of building simulation weather files

Simulation packages for predicting building performance in terms of energy and comfort are becoming increasingly important in the planning process. However, current industry standard weather files for building simulation are not suited to the assessment of the potential impacts of a changing climate, in particular summer overheating risks. In addition, no bespoke climate change weather files are readily available that can be loaded directly into environmental simulation software. This paper describes the integration of future UK climate scenarios into the widely used Typical Meteorological Year (TMY2) and EnergyPlus/ESP-r Weather (EPW) file formats and demonstrates the importance of climate change analysis through a case study example. The ‘morphing’ methodology published by the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) is utilised as a baseline for transforming current CIBSE Test Reference Years (TRY) and Design Summer Years (DSY) into climate change weather years. A tool is presented that allows generation of TMY2/EPW files from this ‘morphed’ data and addresses the requirements related to solar irradiation, temperature, humidity and daylighting beyond the parameters provided by CIBSE weather years. Simulations of a case study building highlight the potential impact of climate change on future summer overheating hours inside naturally ventilated buildings.     

Thermal performance study and evaluation of comfort temperatures in vernacular buildings of North-East India

Solar passive techniques are being used in vernacular buildings throughout the world. Researchers have done extensive study on thermal performance of vernacular buildings in the different parts of the world. Vernacular architecture of North-Eastern India represents the principle of climate-responsive architecture, which still lacks experimental validation and quantitative analysis. Thermal comfort not only makes the occupants comfortable but also governs energy consumption in the building. Detailed field studies on thermal performances of typical traditional vernacular dwellings in different bioclimatic zones have been undertaken. This field study includes detailed survey of 150 vernacular dwellings, field tests and thermal sensation vote of 300 occupants on ASHRAE thermal sensation scale. Field test includes measurement of temperature, humidity, illumination level and building design parameters. Thermal performances of these vernacular dwellings were evaluated for winter, pre-summer, summer/monsoon and pre-winter months of the year 2008. This evaluation is based on ‘adaptive approach’, which is the outcome of the field studies and is now part of ASHRAE standard 55/2004 for predicting comfortable temperature of naturally ventilated buildings. This study also tried to find out the range of comfort temperature in these vernacular buildings for different season of the year. It has been found that these vernacular dwellings perform quite satisfactorily except in the winter months and the occupants feel comfortable in a wider range of temperature.     

Laboratory testing of pipe splitting operations

Pipeline replacement ‘on line’ has been practised for many years using pipe bursting technologies, which typically involve multiple fracture and outward displacement of fragments of the existing pipeline using either pneumatic or hydraulic means. One of the most important considerations for the design of a pipe bursting operation is the pattern of ground displacement caused, and consequently the possible damage to existing adjacent services and structures. Due to the requirement for overburst, the magnitude of the typical outward pattern of displacements caused by pipe bursting following construction is much smaller than the temporary displacements that occur while the process is being carried out. The ground movements during construction will often, therefore, provide the worst case for design. However, this pattern of behaviour is complicated by the possibility of residual ground settlements if the works are carried out in loose granular soils or in soft cohesive deposits in which positive pore water pressures are generated. The pattern and magnitude of displacements have been shown by the first two authors to be dependent on several parameters following a comprehensive programme of laboratory modelling and field trials. Parallel work by Advantica Technologies Limited (formerly research, technology and engineering arms of British Gas) has resulted in the publication of tables and charts detailing ‘safe working distances’ for pipe bursting in relation to cast iron gas mains. Prediction of the ground displacements is clearly vital for the safe operation of these replacement techniques. Pipe splitting is a more recently developed technique that has been proposed for ‘on line’ replacement of ductile iron and steel pipes. This technique has advantages associated with the continuous and pseudo-static, rather than discontinuous and generally dynamic, form of expansion employed. Prior to its adoption in routine industrial practice, however, it is important that differences in the patterns of displacement to those of pipe bursting are known. To this end, Advantica Technologies Limited is currently sponsoring a programme of full-scale laboratory model testing of pipe splitting operations at the University of Birmingham. This paper describes the testing equipment used to determine the effects on the surrounding ground of the pipe splitting operation, details the programme of tests and reports the results of tests conducted in both clays and sands. From the results it was observed that the McElroy Manufacturing Inc. ‘Bullet’ pipe splitting device produced a clean split in the ductile iron pipe whereas the U-Mole Ltd. ‘Clampburster’ produced a much more fragmented host pipe. It has also been found that the orientation of the blade of the pipe splitting device has a considerable impact on the resulting ground displacements. The ‘Bullet’ device allows the orientation of the blade to remain fixed during the operation, whereas the ‘Clampburster’ device currently allows rotation of the blade during the operation. The maximum displacements resulting from both splitting devices are very similar.     

Access and the project manager

The role of the project manager has traditionally concentrated upon the execution of a project, from conception to completion. The commissioning and operation have been a secondary priority, for good reasons which are discussed in this paper. Nowhere has this been more true than in building construction, despite the fact that a building is a place where there is maximum interaction with people of all types. Some 10% of people worldwide are disabled, which prevents them from using buildings and facilities designed for able-bodied people. All this is changing rapidly. No longer should buildings be designed to be accessible only to the majority, nor should special arrangements be provided as an ‘extra’ for disabled people. Design philosophy is being impelled to provide for all building users. Great impetus was provided by the 1981 International Year of Disabled Persons, designated by the United Nations. In the UK, The Prince of Wales' Advisory Group on Disability and the Access Committee for England are influential and active organizations that are exerting a powerful influence for change. New building regulations are introducing a statutory imperative. The attention of project managers is drawn to what is happening in this area, and it is suggested that in their unique position they can influence the bridging of the gap between designers and building operators, to ensure that buildings can be used by all, and that nothing is overlooked at any stage. Legislation alone cannot solve the problem, and a change in attitude is necessary.     

Beyond content and control: project vulnerability and the process agenda

Project management is conventionally defined in terms of deadlines, budgets and technical specifications. Project managers are normally chosen for their expertise in these areas. Research suggests, however, that the contexts of some projects demand a different set of priorities. The paper reports the findings of a competence-based study of the project-management role. The focus of the study was on projects involving strategic combinations of information technology and organizational change. With respect to the management of the implementation process, 15 competences are identified, in five clusters. The findings further suggest how the significance of these process competences depends on the project context, which is shown to vary between high and low levels of ‘vulnerability’. Vulnerability influences the project manager's ‘agenda priorities’, which in turn determine the competences that are critical to effectiveness. The implications of these findings are discussed, in terms of the selection of appropriately skilled managers for projects, the selection of appropriate projects for managers, and the design of relevant approaches to project-management development.     

A review of the emission of VOCs from polymeric materials used in buildings

Building and furnishing materials and consumers products are important sources of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the indoor environment. The emission from materials is usually continuous and may last for many years in a building. The available evidence indicates that VOCs can cause adverse health effects to the building occupants and may contribute to symptoms of ‘Sick Building Syndrome’.

Control of VOC emission should increasingly become an important consideration for the design and manufacture of polymeric materials used in buildings. The EC Construction Products Directive ‘Essential Requirements’ set a framework for limiting the use of materials that could pose a health risk to building occupants. Furthermore, the on-going development of voluntary labelling schemes and data bases of material emissions that could be used by building designers, should further strengthen the demand for ‘low VOC emitting’ products.

This paper reviews available information about the emission of VOCs from polymeric building materials, the level of emissions in the indoor environment and the requirements for testing of the materials.     

Seismic response of multi-storey steel buildings with flexible connections

In the limit states design of steel building frames, usually simplifying assumptions are made with regard to the behaviour of beam-to-column connections. The Canadian standard for steel buildings recognizes three such sets of assumptions. One of them is the ‘special simple construction’ in which the beam-to-column connections are assumed to be completely free (pinned) to resist gravity loads and are assumed to be ‘rigid’ to resist the lateral loads due to earthquake or wind. Such connections are then designed for moments due to lateral loads only, and thus they are usually flexible. This paper is concerned with the influence of the connection flexibility and the strength on the overall strength and stiffness of steel building frames. The study considers 10 storey and 20 storey office buildings. The first part of the paper illustrates the analysis and design of the 10 storey building on the basis of ‘special simple construction’. By using realistic connection behaviour, the frames were subjected to equivalent static loads due to wind or earthquake and El Centro, 1940 earthquake excitation. In the nonlinear static analysis the building frames were subjected to specified gravity loads and incremental lateral loads until failure. In the nonlinear dynamic analysis the buildings were subjected to specified gravity loads and 70% of El Centro, 1940 earthquake excitation. For comparison purposes the frames were analysed twice, first assuming rigid connections and then with flexible connections. The static analyses results show that the connection flexibility increases the building deflections at specified loads, but the strength is only marginally affected. The dynamic analyses results show an increase in deflections and also generally an increase in column bending moments due to connection flexibility and the associated strength.     

Greenways: multiplying and diversifying in the 21st century

Building on the legacy of historic greenway planning in the U.S., several new initiatives have been taking shape and gaining recognition in the past decade. One is ‘Green Infrastructure’ planning which is a ‘must have’ inter-connected system of green spaces. Another is ‘Smart Conservation’—the counterpoint of another planning initiative that preceded it known as ‘Smart Growth’. This is the establishment of critical green corridors that should be preserved and maintained for predominantly ecological functions, in advance of or in conjunction with new development. ‘New Urbanism’ has focused on bringing order and coherence to escalating ‘Edge Cities’ on the urban fringe, based on walkable, mixed-use towns, villages and neighborhoods with integrated open-space systems. Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) are transportation plans for accommodating regional growth around clustered ‘pedestrian pockets’ linked by transit systems. Both New Urbanism and TODs have applied similar principles to ‘brown sites’ and declining city neighborhoods.All these initiatives are different aspects of the greenway movement, expressing its many possibilities, enriching its original concepts, enlarging its credibility—if need be—and emphasizing its importance for and relevance to current issues of sustainability and ‘green’ planning and design. The author, a teacher/practitioner, discusses recent U.S. greenway examples at site, metropolitan and regional scales for which he has been the principal planner/designer or a consultant, and compares New Urbanism and TOD methodologies and approaches to established greenway-planning practices and the premises of Smart Conservation.     

Adaptive architecture: integrating low-energy technologies for climate control in the desert

The article describes a ‘climatically adaptive’ approach to intelligent building in which a variety of technologies are integrated in the architectural design to provide thermal comfort with a minimal expenditure of energy. This concept is illustrated by the design of the Blaustein International Center for Desert Studies, a multi-use complex completed recently at the Sede-Boker Campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In response to the local climate of this desert region, a number of strategies were developed by the authors to exploit natural energy for heating and cooling: earth berming of major parts of the building, ‘selective glazing’ for seasonal shading and energy collection, a down-draft ‘cool-tower’ for evaporative cooling and a hybrid mechanism for hot-air supply are several of the unique systems whose performance and feasibility are analyzed within the context of the overall building design.     

Project conceptualization using pragmatic methods

An important and difficult part of project management is the conceptualization stage – particularly when dealing with multiple powerful stakeholders and ‘messy’ situations. Pragmatism provides a way forward that makes central the ‘concepts’ being used to conceptualize the project (e.g. ‘timeliness’ or ‘sustainability’). This paper argues for a sequence of two approaches suggested in the literature that combine this pragmatism and soft systems thinking to conceptualize projects. These are Alexander’s ‘Synthesis’ [1] and Checkland’s ‘CATWOE’ [2]. The first identifies concepts or worldviews, the second uses these to draft a series of ‘what needs to be done’ statements. In the way of Pragmatic Systems Inquiry, these approaches suggested from the literature are then compared to a real case study: the LC-25 project.     

Daylight as a zoning device for midtown

Since 1960, New York City's Midtown district has experienced an office building boom with the construction of seventy million square feet (650 300 m²) of new office space in one hundred eleven buildings. During this period it became increasingly clear that this new generation of superscale office towers, such as AT & T and IBM, were overpowering their context by dramatically diminishing the daylighting available to the public streets, parks, plazas, and neighboring buildings.The prime cause of this environmental dilemma was the permissive and subjective manner in which the City Planning Commission reviewed Midtown buildings. The waiving of the rigid as-of-right or automatic height and setback regulations for a negotiated review, conceived to encourage good architecture, resulted in daylighting conditions which were measurably worse than those that, in part, led to the call for zoning to protect public access to “light and air” in 1916. The as-of-right zoning regulations which were enacted to guarantee an adequate level of solar access had been superceded by negotiated or discretionary zoning and in the process one of the original goals of zoning was lost.Responding to the defined need for procedural certainty, public accountability, and design and development flexibility, the consultants proposed a performance system of as-of-right zoning based on objective criteria and measurement techniques. The centerpiece of the new building bulk regulations is a modified Waldram Diagram on which the daylighting performance of a building is evaluated against a threshold and standard. The threshold and standard were systematically derived from an analysis of the sixty-year historical expectation for daylight in Midtown. The performance system as adopted by the City is presently being programmed for computer evaluation.     

Principles of diamond tool technology for sawing rock

In a rock sawing operation, a single diamond particle acting as a sliding indenter expends energy by generating compression in the rock in the form of a ‘stress epicentre’ through the action of confined crushing: this compression causes the rock fracture mechanism. It is not a cutting operation per se—indeed sharp diamond particles can be a liability. The sawing requirement is for a high strength, high heat resistance indentor, with a potential for displacement that is compatible with that of the rock. Currently used tests for rock strength do not indicate energy consumption, but the Shore and Brinell hardness tests are relevant. However, the consumed energy is predictable from a new index of rock strength, called Brook hardness, which has been specifically developed for sliding diamond indenters. The ‘stress epicentre’ is located with reference to the diamond indenter through a force vector which is stable for all circular sawing velocities, but it changes with frame sawing and drilling because they operate at about a tenth of the sawing velocity. The ‘stress epicentre’ is at the location of the crushed, compacted material under the indenter. Changes in the position of the stress epicentre can increase energy efficiency by as much as 100% and reduce the generation of vertical force by as much as 70%. Drilling tests using feed/revolution as the measure of penetration are used to simulate the variable velocity of frame saws by reducing the revolutions/minute. These tests reveal a previously unrecorded sawing mechanism that can improve the use of frame saws because strong granite can now be frame sawn with diamond. This improved potential should also apply to drill bits if they use feed per revolution as the means of penetration, instead of a static bit load. By measuring diamond by volume rather than by weight, and considering alternative options, accurate tool control can now be achieved, with every aspect being predictable. Optimisation of rock sawing operations has shown that performance can be increased by 100–200% with tools removing as much as 30 tonnes in saw cuts per carat of diamond consumed. Because some rock mechanics terms used in the paper may have different meanings in the rock sawing context, a glossary of terms with further explanations is included at the end of the paper.     

Computer-aided building energy analysis techniques

Buildings are slowly replacing long-term investments that consume a lot of energy. Given current economic, as well as environmental constraints on energy resources, the energy issue plays an important role in the design and operation of buildings. Careful long-term decisions in the design and operation of buildings can significantly improve their thermal performance and thus reduce their consumption of energy. Alternative building design strategies, standards compliance and economic optimization can be evaluated using available energy analysis techniques. These range from simplified manual energy analysis methods for approximate energy use estimates to detailed computerized hourly simulation. The availability and ease of use of today’s computers make them effective tools in the decision-making process of building design. This paper reviews the most common building energy analysis techniques and the potential applications of computer technology in the energy simulation and optimization of buildings.     

New ‘rural lifestyle estates’ in The Netherlands

Recent studies tend to indicate that no longer all presently agricultural land in The Netherlands is required for sustainable agricultural production. Apart from various urban uses and some projects turning agricultural land into nature reserves or giving it a secondary function, like national landscape parks or drinking water supply area, it is not easy to find alternative users for the land presently managed by farmers. At the same time, many urban companies or families are vainly looking for building lots away from our ‘compact urban areas’. This paper explores a way to bring this supply and demand together in a landscape-wise more than acceptable manner: the planning concept and experiment of ‘new rural lifestyle estates’.     

European 3G auctions: Using a comparative event study to search for a winner's curse

This paper seeks to identify any possible winner's curse in the European 3G licence administration processes. The existence of a winner's curse has been suggested as a reason to relax the licensing conditions and the regulatory environment. The winner's curse will be tested by comparing event studies across countries which differ in terms of licence administration procedures. If a winner's curse occurred in some auctions, we may expect a ‘winner's bounty’ for those companies obtaining licences through non-auction methods. The study finds that there is at least short-term evidence of a winner's curse.     

Numerical methods in rock mechanics

The purpose of this CivilZone review paper is to present the techniques, advances, problems and likely future development directions in numerical modelling for rock mechanics and rock engineering. Such modelling is essential for studying the fundamental processes occurring in rock, for assessing the anticipated and actual performance of structures built on and in rock masses, and hence for supporting rock engineering design. We begin by providing the rock engineering design backdrop to the review in Section 1. The states-of-the-art of different types of numerical methods are outlined in Section 2, with focus on representations of fractures in the rock mass. In Section 3, the numerical methods for incorporating couplings between the thermal, hydraulic and mechanical processes are described. In Section 4, inverse solution techniques are summarized. Finally, in Section 5, we list the issues of special difficulty and importance in the subject. In the reference list, ‘significant’ references are asterisked and ‘very significant’ references are doubly asterisked.     

Enhanced energy conservation in houses through high performance design

Key design features of high performance houses are investigated for improving energy efficiency in cold climates. Reference dwellings with typical constructions and system designs are compared with high performance houses using the best technology available. The dwellings used for reference are a multi-family apartment building and a single-family detached house, designed according to a mix of Nordic building codes of 2001. The high performance houses designed fulfilled the target requirements of IEA Task 28, Sustainable Solar Housing. Simulations of the buildings are performed using the computer programme DEROB-LTH and results from simulations give the hourly space-heating demand and peak load of the buildings. A comparison of reference houses to high performance solutions shows that the space-heating demand can be reduced by up to 83% for single-family houses and by up to 85% for apartment buildings. The climate data used for all simulations is Stockholm, Sweden. The environmental effects in terms of CO₂ equivalent emissions and use of non-renewable primary energy are quantified for each building type and construction. The energy saving potential of high performance houses in cold climates is demonstrated.     

Modeling occupancy and behavior for better building design and operation—A critical review

People spend more than 90% of their life time in buildings, which makes occupant behavior one of the leading influences of energy consumption in buildings. Occupancy and occupant behavior, which refer to human presence inside buildings and their active interactions with various building system such as lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation, window blinds, and plugs, attract great attention of research with regard to better building design and operation. Due to the stochastic nature of occupant behavior, prior occupancy models vary dramatically in terms of data sampling, spatial and temporal resolution. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the current modeling efforts of occupant behavior, summarizes occupancy models for various applications including building energy performance analysis, building architectural and engineering design, intelligent building operations and building safety design, and presents challenges and areas where future research could be undertaken. In addition, modeling requirement for different applications is analyzed. Furthermore, a few commonly used statistical and data mining models are presented. The purpose of this paper is to provide a modeling reference for future researchers so that a proper method or model can be selected for a specific research purpose.