resilience

The Renson One residential concept focusses on the building envelope and the mechanical installations to ensure a climate-adaptive and resilient design throughout the year. Passive, renewable and energy-efficient elements are combined to address the total indoor environment and energy consumption, based on integrated control mechanisms. The high potential of external shading and ventilative cooling was proved to limit overheating and cooling consumption. Adding manual control of the windows to the simulations is a challenge to better approach reality.  

This paper presents an analysis of the resilience to climate change of a direct adiabatic cooling system integrated within an industrial building. The system is a solution that utilizes humidified porous material to lower the air temperature without requiring external energy. In this study, the system is evaluated for two typical climate periods (historical and future) for a Mediterranean climate, using indicators of energy performance, thermal comfort and water consumption.

There is an increasing need to consider and evaluate the effect of existing ambient warmness on current low energy buildings to determine if current guidelines and standards are robust or resilient in the face of projected future warming. Thus far there is a lack of empirical evidence from low energy non-residential spaces where resilience metrics are seldom explored. The purpose of this presentation is to present the status on overheating from over 30 different low energy non-residential buildings located in Ireland.

Embedding robust yet accessible frameworks to evaluate ventilative cooling potential during the early/concept design stages for building practitioners can help in reducing the performance gap as well as avoiding vulnerability “lock-in” from design decisions that are based on poor or inadequate information. The challenge is to develop performance based evaluation methods that recognise the tacit approach to design in practice. Often design is iterative, non-linear and multi-agent.

The world is facing a rapid increase of air conditioning of buildings. This is driven by multiple factors, such as urbanisation and densification, climate change and elevated comfort expectations together with economic growth in hot and densely populated climate regions of the world. The trend towards cooling seems inexorable therefore it is mandatory to guide this development towards sustainable solutions.