energy efficiency

In Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, Mark Lynas describes possible world scenarios as global temperatures rise. The central region of Brazil, where Brasília is located, will suffer major changes in its microclimate.Brasília's built environment has already provided a comfortable indoor and outdoor condition through planned urban design and vegetation.

The study is placed within the context of local building regulations in India. Building regulations, for fenestration in general and window openings in particular, are, to a large extent, ambiguous in nature. In the context of India, observations show that the regulations specify window size for the sole purpose of ventilation whereas windows are major roleplayers in the thermal and daylighting performance of buildings.

This paper presents a model-based supervisory control strategy for online control of building central cooling water systems to enhance their energy efficiency. Simplified chiller and cooling tower models are developed and used to predict the system energy performance, environment quality as well as the system response to the changes of control settings. A novel and simple optimization technique, named as PMES method, is developed and used to seek the optimal control settings under the given working conditions.