Urban areas tend to have higher air temperatures than their rural surroundings as a result of gradual surface modifications that include replacing the natural vegetation with buildings and roads. The term Urban Heat Island describes this phenomenon. The surfaces of buildings and pavements absorb solar radiation and become extremely hot, which in turn warm the surrounding air. Cities that have been paved over do not receive the benefit of the natural cooling effect of vegetation. As the air temperature rises, so does the demand for air-conditioning (a/c).

A simplified method was investigated for estimating the dynamic pressure tangential to an opening (Pt) with Irwin’s surface wind sensor. The wind velocity measured by this sensor was broadly consistent with the value measured by a hot-wire anemometer. Mor

The growing demand for better environmental conditions, especially in offices, has increased the need for appropriate standard in order to success the maximum productivity, to minimize the problems of health and the functional cost of air-condition systems. The purpose of this study is to investigate the thermal environment in offices of occupants in University of Patras.

The solar façade of the FIAT Research Center (CRF) was realized recently near Turin in Italy, under cooperation between CRF and Politecnico di Milano. The photovoltaic elements, that has a total power of 19.5 kWp, produces electric energy, while the force

Due to the rapid growth of the country, prototype school buildings in Saudi Arabia were designed with little effort made towards the utilization of the natural resources to improve indoor conditions. Most of the existing school buildings in Riyadh, the capital city of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, rely on mechanical equipment to cool interior spaces. As a result, these schools have become one of the major energy consumers during the peak time of the day.

The article shows the results of a case study dealing with indoor daylighting concepts and practice. The analysis evaluates the performances of different window options taking into account quantitative and qualitative aspects such as daylight factor, uniformity ratio of illuminance, and daylighting glare index.

Defrosting in supermarket refrigeration systems is normally controlled by a preset time cycle with most display cabinets timed to defrost every 6 hours. It is widely acknowledged that timed defrost may cause a number of unnecessary defrost cycles and this reduces the energy efficiency of refrigeration systems as well as the accuracy of temperature control of the cases.

It has been shown by previous researchers that Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) not only be used to predict energy more reliably than traditional simulation models and regression techniques but can also from the basis for a predictive controller of thermal systems such as HVAC equipment. This work is directed towards the identification of the important inputs (independent variables) to facilitate on-line prediction and thereby implement refrigeration and HVAC system diagnostics, process control, optimisation and energy management in retail food stores.

In the last years, as fenestration and shading systems have become more complex and sophisticated, a great improvement of thermal and solar-optical performance has been required and as a consequence old methods of characterization have become inadequate. This evolution has yielded the introduction of new lumped parameters and the implementation of more sophisticated calculation models, which allow to evaluate the performance of fenestration and shading systems taking into account a large number of factors, such as the angular dependence of solar heat gain.

This paper compares the results obtained with the simplified sizing methodologies for thermal energy storage components usual in HVAC current practice and those obtained from an optimised procedure based on hourly simulations. The PC version of the building energy analysis programme DOE2.1E was used in energy simulations of a central hospital in Lisbon, as part of an energy audit. The audit enabled the simulation model to be calibrated.