The power of suburbia

IT IS A COMMONLY held belief that a compact city is a more energy-efficient city. In Auckland, like many other cities, this has become enshrined in policy. Compact housing is believed to have a lower surface to volume ratio and will therefore lose less heat. The low-density urban form of suburbia is also believed to be energy inefficient because of high oil-dependent private transport use. At face value, compact houses and urban forms appear to be the solution for a sustainable Auckland. But while these beliefs may be true for now, consider the future when: ●the climate will be warmer ●emerging technologies will replace the internal combustion engine ●harvesting energy from rooftop photovoltaics will be cheaper than the grid. Should we be designing buildings and cities for the present or for future conditions

How to achieve sustainability : regulatory challenges

The importance of designing sustainable buildings is gaining greater acceptance worldwide. Evidence of this is how regulators are incorporating sustainable design principles into building regulations and requirements. The aim being to increase the number of sustainable buildings and move from a traditional voluntary compliance to one that is mandatory. However, developing regulations that actually achieve these aims can be a difficult exercise. Several countries in South East Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have performance based building regulations that are supplemented by prescriptive measures for achieving the desired performance. Australia too has similar building regulations and has had energy efficiency regulations within the Building Code of Australia for over a decade. This paper explores some of the difficulties and problems that Australian regulators have experienced with the performance-based method and the prescriptive or “deemed-to-comply” method and measures that have been taken to try and overcome these problems. These experiences act as a useful guide to all regulators considering the incorporation of sustainable design measures into their countries building regulations. The paper also speculates on future environmental requirements being incorporated into regulations, including the possibility of non-residential buildings being required to meet minimum energy efficiency requirements, and the possible systems that would need to be in place before such requirements were included. Finally, the paper looks at a possible way forward using direct assessment from electronic designs and introduces several software tools that are currently being developed that move towards achieving this goal. Keywords: Sustainable buildings, Performance-based, Regulations, Energy efficiency, Assessment tools

Capturing Reuse Considerations During Initial Structural Design

The Major Qualifying Project focused on improving the lifecycle of public buildings by designing for adaptive reuse. The project team developed an alternate structural design for an elementary school that minimizes interior columns and anticipates future needs. Sustainable strategies were examined to lower maintenance cost and extend the building’s lifespan. A cost estimate of the redesign was generated for comparisons. The final deliverable establishes a rating system that assesses the flexibility of the structural design for future use

On the Evaluation of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Data of a Campus Charging Network

The mass adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) requires the deployment of public charging stations. Such facilities are expected to employ distributed generation and storage units to reduce the stress on the grid and boost sustainable transportation. While prior work has made considerable progress in deriving insights for understanding the adverse impacts of PEV chargings and how to alleviate them, a critical issue that affects the accuracy is the lack of real world PEV data. As the dynamics and pertinent design of such charging stations heavily depend on actual customer demand profile, in this paper we present and evaluate the data obtained from a $17$ node charging network equipped with Level $2$ chargers at a major North American University campus. The data is recorded for $166$ weeks starting from late $2011$. The result indicates that the majority of the customers use charging lots to extend their driving ranges. Also, the demand profile shows that there is a tremendous opportunity to employ solar generation to fuel the vehicles as there is a correlation between the peak customer demand and solar irradiation. Also, we provided a more detailed data analysis and show how to use this information in designing future sustainable charging facilities.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Energycon 201

The sustainable co-design of products and production systems

The challenges in designing products and production systems are becoming increasingly complex due to more changeable customer demands, frequent product updates, and the requirements for resource efficiency. Established design processes are often unable to readily accommodate these rapid changes. In addition, incremental benefits are often achieved through existing sustainable design approaches due to inability to fully assess the impacts of product design improvements and their associated implications within production facilities. This highlights the need for more integrated design processes that enable seamless co-development of products and production systems. This paper examines the current interrelation and interaction of these design processes from the resource efficiency viewpoint, proposes a novel sustainable ‘Co-Design’ model, and discusses the ecological benefits of co-designing future products and production systems

POSSIBILITIES OF ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN INTERIOR DESIGN

Sustainable design looks at the environmental, social and economic categories in interactions that deliver significant environmental and health solutions. Common trends in society show that sustainable thinking has not yet become a way of life and is fragmented. This justifies the need for both future and existing professionals – architects and environmental / interior designers – to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills in designing and evaluating projects in aspects of sustainability that are related to public health and well-being. The aim of the article is to determine the criteria for the evaluation of sustainable design, which should be taken into account during the development and implementation of the interior design project. Research methods – theoretical – research and analysis of scientific literature