Implementation of adaptive lighting systems to reduce stressful situations in multi-user spaces

The paper presents the analysis of scientific publications and patents on non-visual effects of lighting on human body. The effects of lighting on conflict behavior and stressful state of a person were studied when using adaptive lighting systems. The methods and approaches of the developed adaptive lighting systems and the constraints associated with these methods were analyze

Exploring occupant behaviour potentialities for historic buildings\u27 energy retrofit

In recent years, the topic of historic buildings’ energy retrofit has been investigated increasingly by the energy research sector, especially in the European area. This phenomenon is related to a number of reasons, among which the increasing awareness of the role that this category of buildings have to reach the European carbon emissions’ reduction targets by 2050. In fact, more than 14% of the European building stock dates from before 1920, but this percentage rises to 50% in several urban centres. Despite the increasing interest on the topic, several studies on historic buildings’ energy retrofit seems not aware of cultural heritage protection and conservation legislations and practices. For this reason, nowadays, the objectives of these two sectors seems to be unbalanced. Since the tradition of heritage conservation and protection are rooted in the society’s cultural background, there is the necessity of proposing a change of perspective about the role of the energy sector in the restoration field. Primarily, energy retrofit should be addressed at increasing the liveability and economic sustainability of historic buildings, having their social profitability as a central scope. In terms of solutions, the architectural heritage is characterized by a great variability, so its energy retrofit requires a high level of multidisciplinary knowledge. Moreover, due to the uniqueness of historic buildings, the necessity of individuating replicable solutions for their energy retrofit can be satisfied at a maximum degree by proposing a common procedural approach, which could be realized thorough the elaboration of a methodology. Based on the previous aspects, for the present work a strand of the energy research has been individuated as a potential ground to balance heritage conservation and energy efficiency aims. This strand is occupant behaviour or, more generally, building operation. This PhD dissertation tackled the previous aspects by proposing the elaboration and test of a methodology called “BIOSFERA” (Building Intelligent Operational Strategies For Energy Retrofit Aims”). Testing the methodology on a pilot study, which consisted on the experimentation on four case studies, a first answer to the following research question was provided: What are the potentialities of energy saving and indoor environmental conditions’ enhancement by acting only on the way non-residential historic buildings are operated by occupants and operators? The results obtained in the pilot study were promising, especially in perspective of a broader application of this methodology on a larger scale. In fact, in all buildings for which an energy consumption assessment was possible, the obtained energy savings ranged from 11% to 16% considering the whole experimentation, with seasonal peaks of more than 30%. In terms of indoor environmental conditions, the energy saving trend resulted, in the large majority of cases, on occupants’ perceived thermal comfort amelioration or stability. In the following, a synthetic summary of the PhD dissertation is provided. The first part of this work is dedicated to the investigation of the two corpus of knowledge that constituted the basis for the elaboration of the BIOSFERA methodology. After an introductory chapter, the tradition of conservation and protection of cultural heritage was summarized in a chapter dedicated to “Preservation”, in which two main questions were answered: Which buildings are protected and why? How to deal with protected buildings? The third chapter, dedicated to “Adaptation”, contains the energy-related literature that guided the elaboration of the methodology. In particular, the chapter incorporates: i) A summary on how the topic of energy retrofit has been faced in researches and energy- related legislations and guidelines; ii) An overview about literature on the management of indoor environmental conditions for artworks conservation; iii) An outline of a strand of the energy research that has been chosen as a basis to develop the BIOSFERA methodology: building energy–related operation and occupant behaviour. A fourth chapter is dedicated to summarize the aspects emerged from the previous two ones and introduces how they have been integrated in the theoretical framework of the BIOSFERA methodology. The second part of the dissertation describes the BIOSFERA methodology design and theoretical phases. Chapters 5 is dedicated to an introduction to the methodology design. Chapters 6- 8 describe the three theoretical phases (Diagnosis, Intervention and Control) in terms of objectives, materials to be acquired, analyses and results’ elaboration. In this part, the objective is to provide a comprehensive overview of a series of instruments and analyses that should be successively chosen based on the application context’s specificities and necessities. Based on the previous theoretical framework, chapter 9 proposes conclusions about the methodology potentialities and barriers. The third part describes the application of the BIOSFERA methodology in a pilot study executed in four Italian case studies. In particular, chapter 10 is dedicated to the description of how case studies were selected for the experimentation. Chapter 11 is aimed at describing how the theoretical phases enunciated in part II can be translated on a real application. This detailed description is provided by reporting the experience on one case study. Chapter 12 is addressed to show how the created methodology can be flexible based on the specificities of the buildings to which it is applied. To this aim, the experimentation on the other three case studies is outlined by coupling a synthetic description of the experiment with specific focus topics that were chosen to stress the methodology’s flexibility and potentialities. Finally, chapter 13 provides a general “picture” of the impact that the methodology had on the four case studies, providing a first answer to the study’s research question. The fourth and final part is articulated in two chapters. Chapter 14 is dedicated to a critical review of the methodology design and theoretical phases in perspective of a possible implementation on a broader scale. The critical review is based on the experience gathered during the pilot study. Chapter 15 contains the conclusive summary, characterized by an outline of the results obtained in the dissertation, as well as the recognized potentialities and barriers in perspective of further researches towards a broader application of the BIOSFERA methodology

Effects of Artificial Lighting in Dormitories on College Students’ Physiology and Production

abstract: The artificial lighting plays crucial role in the human life in the contemporary, globalized and highly complex world. Its influence on the physical and psychological health of the humans was studied by numerous reputable scholars from across the globe, however this study focuses on the impact of light on the college students living in the dormitories. The study seeks to find whether there is a correlation between light and health of the student, his/her performance, productivity, mood and feelings. The paper uses a relatively new housing near Arizona State University Tempe-campus as a case study as an attempt to substantiate the problem dimensions and suggest feasible solutions. Basing on the available literature on the topic and the case study evaluation, the author determined the range of possible recommendations for the lighting professionals in the industry to maximally satisfy the needs of the students and make their stay and life in the dormitory comfortable and healthy experience. The relevant conclusions are made basing on the obtained results.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Design 201

Smart Lighting and Student Performance: A Novel System Design, Implementation, and Effects in Classrooms

As one of the most essential factors of learning environment, lighting in classroom has been found to have significant impact on student performance. Moreover, brightness level and correlated color temperature (CCT) are the two key luminous properties that have been examined in many relevant studies. And researchers were increasingly focusing on the diversity of luminous requirements under different learning context. However, knowledge regarding the optimum lighting configuration (the combination of brightness and CCT) for some specific learning context is still insufficient due to the complexity of reality, including learning context, classroom environment, demographic characteristics of students and user preferences. To enrich the pertinent knowledge of both engineering and academia, three major works were conducted in this study. Firstly, a context-based smart lighting system was designed and implemented. This system has been tested in more than one hundred classrooms from about ten schools. It turned out to be an advanced and practical solution. Secondly, the data of a field study for examining the effect of different lighting settings on student academic performance were collected and analyzed. The field study involved twelve classrooms, 568 students of grade one and grade two from one elementary school in China. The results showed that students in context-based lighting environment significantly improved more on both Language and Mathematics than those in standard lighting environment. Interestingly, although no significant effect of gender was reported via MANOVA (multivariate analysis of variance), the separated t-tests indicated that the lighting environment had significant effect on female, but not on male. Regarding user operation preference, it was out of expectation that no significant difference was found. Lastly, an innovative indoor environmental data-processing framework was proposed. This framework can automatically optimize lighting configuration for different learning context by gathering and analyzing a variety of classroom data and student data, including learning context, illumination settings, environmental data, student performance and some demographic information. It made it possible to shift the research practice from traditional controlled laboratory experiments to emerging Big Data and machine learning methods. Although this study was only a preliminary work towards the best lighting settings in classrooms, it established a solid foundation (the smart lighting system) and embarked on a novel approach (the self-optimizable framework) for research in this area. Some ideas and topics for future study were also discussed

Simulation-based support for integrated design of new low-energy office buildings

This thesis reports on four years of research with the aim to contribute to the implementation of low-energy office buildings with high quality of indoor environment and good total economy. Focus has been on the design decisions made in the early stages of the building design process. The objective is to contribute to a development where simulations of building energy performance and indoor environment is used for generating an input to the overall building design process prior to any actual form giving of the building. This input should be considered as one of several similar inputs from other building design disciplines (structural, fire, architecture etc.) to the integrated building design process. The research therefore revolves around the hypothesis that parametric analyses on the energy performance, indoor environment and total economy of rooms with respect to geometry and characteristics of building elements and services can be used to generate a useful input to the early stage of an integrated building design process. To pursue a corroboration of this hypothesis, a method for making informed decisions when establishing the input to the overall building design process is proposed. The method relies on the use of building simulation to illustrate how design parameters will affect the energy performance and the quality of the indoor environment prior to any actual design decision. The method is made operational in a simple building simulation tool capable of performing integrated performance predictions of energy consumption, thermal indoor environment, indoor air quality, and daylight levels. The tool has been tested extensively throughout the four year period of this project. The feedback from these tests has been used to develop the operability and usability of the tool. The end result is a tool which, with minor reservations, has proved to be operational and useful in the design of low-energy office buildings with good indoor environment. The conducted research is reported in the main body of this thesis and in three papers for scientific journals. An abstract of these is given in the following. Article I The early stages of building design include a number of decisions which have a strong influence on the performance of the building throughout the rest of the process. It is therefore important that designers are aware of the consequences of these design decisions. This paper presents a method for making informed decisions in the early stages of building design to fulfil performance requirements with regard to energy consumption and indoor environment. The method is operationalised in a program that utilises a simple simulation program to make performance predictions of user-defined parameter variations. The program then presents the output in a way that enables designers to make informed decisions. The method and the program reduce the need for design iterations, reducing time consumption and construction costs, to obtain the intended energy performance and indoor environment. Paper published in Energy and Buildings 42 (7) (2010), 1113-1119. doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2010.02.002 Article II A method for simulating predictive control of building systems operation in the design stage is presented. The predictive control method uses building simulation based on weather forecasts to predict whether there is a future heating or cooling requirement. This information enables the thermal control systems of the building to respond proactively to keep the operational temperature within the thermal comfort range with the minimum use of energy. The method is assuming perfect weather prediction and building modelling because of the design situation. The method is implemented in an existing building simulation tool. A test case featuring an office located in Copenhagen, Denmark, shows that the suggested method reduces the energy required for heating and ventilation compared to more conventional control systems, while improving thermal comfort for building occupants. The method furthermore automates the configuration of buildings systems operation. This eliminates time consuming manual configuration of building systems operation when using building simulation for parametric analyses in the design phase. Applied Energy 88 (2011) 4597–4606. doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2011.05.053 Article III Increasing requirements for energy performance in new buildings mean the cost of incorporating energy-saving in buildings is also increasing. Building designers thus need to be aware of the long-term cost-effectiveness of potential energy-conserving measures. This paper presents a simplified and transparent economic optimisation method to find an initial design proposal near the economical optimum. The aim is to provide an expedient starting point for the building design process and more detailed economic optimisation. The method uses the energy frame concept to express the constraints of the optimisation problem, which is then solved by minimising the costs of conserving energy in all the individual energy-saving measures. A case example illustrates how the method enables designers to establish a qualified estimate of an economically optimal solution. Such an estimate gives a good starting point for the iterative design process and a more detailed economic optimisation. Furthermore, the method explicitly illustrates the economic efficiency of the individual building elements and services enabling the identification of potentials for further product development. Paper published in Renewable Energy 38(1) (2012) 173-180. doi:10.1016/j.renene.2011.07.01

Cooling Load Prediction for Different Building Types and Room Occupancy Detection Using Accelerometers

There are two parts in this thesis: the first part was conducted at UWM, and the second part was conducted at Johnson Controls using the knowledge and skills that I learned throughout my time in the Master’s Degree program. The primary purpose of my time at UWM was to compare different types of buildings with two popular machine learning regression algorithms, artificial neural network (ANN), supported vector machine regression (SVR) algorithms, and lastly to provide the results of my research to better help building managers make more informed decisions in regard to electrical utilities. The major objective is to use algorithms and neural networks to detect the occupancy of a room using real-time data from accelerometers. This data could then be used to enable HVAC systems to be more efficient and intelligent. My research at UWM consists of 6 chapters. The background and related research are shown first in chapter 1 and chapter 2. Chapter 3 focuses on analyzing different building types, which aims to provide an overlook in the feature of the data. The basic concepts of ANN and SVR are included in the Chapter 4. The last chapter is the summary of internship in Johnson Controls during the summer. The project goal, data analysis and results are presented with details. A brief occupancy detection review of the industry as well as the basic knowledge of Wavelet Transform and K-means++ algorithm are also mentioned in Chapter 7. The result of my research at UWM shows that it is necessary to apply different models for different building types if high accuracy is required. Compared to SVR, ANN is more accurate in all the building types. However, the difference of the accuracy depends on the building features. In a hospital, SVR and ANN both show high accuracy, but in restaurants, they are both underperforming. Additionally, using vibration magnitude measured from accelerometers to detect occupancy has proved to be feasible during the first stage. However, more complicated cases and patterns need to be considered and higher resolution sensors will need to be tested in the future work

Human experience in the natural and built environment : implications for research policy and practice

22nd IAPS conference. Edited book of abstracts. 427 pp. University of Strathclyde, Sheffield and West of Scotland Publication. ISBN: 978-0-94-764988-3