Sunlight is necessary for life. Managing sunlight is necessary to achieve a level of comfort for living. Radiation transfer through glazing has an impact on costs for heating, cooling and lighting in a building and on environment. The energy that is gained or lost may be solar or thermal energy. Glazing materials are known to respond differently to these two types of energy. This paper provides a comfortable choice in solar design by providing an understanding of solar energy and the tools for managing the amount and type of sunlight permitted through glazing systems.
Heat island is a very well documented climatic phenomenon that has an important energy and environmental impact in the urban environment. The main energy problems are related to the important increase of the energy consumption for cooling purposes as well as to the important increase of the peak electricity load. Heat island in Athens, Greece, is measured during the last decade and its energy impact is calculated in details. The aim of the present paper is to estimate the direct and indirect environmental impact of the heat island effect in Athens.
The energy consumption matter for the building sector has come up again urgently looking for standards, measures, policies and best practices. That is because building sector have direct impact both on energy consumption and environment (cooling, heating, raw materials for construction, consumption of natural sources-water, fossil fuels and emissions of harmful substances). Buildings are responsible for the approximately 40% of the primary energy consumption in EU (164 millions buildings in EU- 15, 193 millions in EU-25) and for about 50% of CO2 emissions.
The use of centralized air-conditioning systems in buildings with fixed windows is becoming an increasingly high-risk strategy in buildings for a number of reasons. These include fuel insecurity and price rises, the need to reduce climate change emissions from the built environment, and the need to make buildings more robust in the face of the extreme weather events that are beginning to characterize climates in a warming world.
As dry assembled multi-layered walls very often suffer overheating in hot climates because of their low thermal inertia, the appropriate use of Phase Change Materials (PCM) inside the same walls can increase their thermal mass before they reach high temperatures (which they tend to do when irradiated by the sun) avoiding overheating.
Achieving good building energy performance has been a major challenge in architecture but has intensified over the past twenty years. Today, the constant increasing cost of energy and the environmental impact of production and energy use make reduced energy use a significant objective in the design and operation of buildings. This paper addresses the general problem of minimizing building energy consumption and the associated operational costs of HVAC systems in an existing building.
China is rightly regarded as a country in which progress on developing sustainable and low energy solutions for building design is essential. The size of the population, the rapid urbanisation that is taking place, and the reliance on fossil fuel based energy sources, not only make this a priority for China but also for the rest of the world. The concept of zero emissions or zero energy buildings has been in existence for many years in the UK and other developed countries and more recently has evolved to larger scale examples such as the development of complete housing schemes.
The insertion of Phase Change Materials (PCM) inside light dry assembled building envelopes seems to be the right way to solve overheating problems usually caused by the low thermal inertia of such walls.
This work aims at applying a numerical analysis methodology, based on CFD techniques, to evaluate the effect of the wind and the temperature over the quality vision of a new telescope in La Palma (Spain). This island constitutes one of the best places in the world to carry out astronomy experiments. However, small variations in the climate conditions, together with the particle dispersion, drastically affect the selection of the best place where this building may be installed.
The thermal and visual performance of eleven residential building has been studied during the architectural design. In order to evaluate the performance of the building a number of thermal and visual simulations have been done. The outputs of thermal simulations are the monthly values of heating and cooling load. Concerning the visual performance the calculations outputs are spatial distribution of the daylight factor, luminance and illuminance pictures. The final architectural design and the proposed interventions results to low energy consumption for cooling and heating too.
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