Assessment and modelling of energy use and indoor environment towards conservation in historical art gallery buildings

This PhD study presents a set of non-invasive methods developed to assess and model the indoor environmental conditions and the building energy use in the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS). This was to meet three intentions, firstly, to provide a detailed and efficient guidance to the facility managers of such building type on the building’s indoor environmental performance with respect to artwork conservation standards, and energy performance with respect to benchmarks from official standards such as CIBSE. Secondly, to provide good practice guidance on latent energy investment towards maintaining indoor moisture conditions relative to conservation specifications. Motivation behind this moisture control was found to be the parameter which is the most critical to artwork conservation, and previous studies revealing the significant amount of energy costs associated to meet the demands of maintaining the adequate indoor moisture specifications. And thirdly, to provide a robust tool which can mimic the complex, non linear building system and provide forecasting with high speed and accuracy. This model also enables the building management to test various optimisation options, while attempting to reduce energy consumption in the building while adhering to artwork conservation standards. The assessment methods were developed following a large-scale refurbishment event in the NGS, and involved a post-renovation impact study. The latent energy investment was analysed with the help of a new weather feature variable, developed as a part of this study. This was named as ‘Humidity-Day’ (HD) concept, analogous to the Degree Day concept. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was employed to model the complex NGS building system and predict indoor temperature, RH and building energy consumption – Gas and Electricity. This directly catered to the need to test optimisation strategies to cut down energy costs without jeopardising the healthy conditions of delicate artworks housed in the building. The positive effects of refurbishment in the NGS were highlighted by performance indicators. An overall indoor environment improvement of 16% was observed, out of which maintenance of indoor RH improved by 4% and the same for temperature by 12%. Winters experienced the maximum overall indoor environmental improvement of 59%. The indoor stability assessed by newly developed fluctuation parameters for both hourly and daily cases highlighted that the NGS experienced stable indoor temperature and RH, especially after the refurbishment. In addition to the benefits to indoor environment, the refurbishment regime brought a cut-down in NGS gas consumption by 27%. The Humidity Day Concept was developed and applied as a global climatic indicator focusing on moisture extremes relative to conservation specifications. Next, the HD based humidification estimates were employed as a good practice indicator and the humidification action of the NGS in the year 2015 was checked for over-consumption periods in a year. It was observed that 33% of the time, there was overconsumption related to humidification, especially during the winter months. Maximum overconsumption was experienced during October and November, where the NGS humidifier load exceeded the good practice mark by up to two times. The system identification model of the NGS was tested with excellent accuracies of up to 99% correlation between predicted results and the actual recorded data. It is also concluded that ANNs are able to work with limited amount of building systems data (real data) readily available from the building management. The study further reinstates that the ANN based SI model can prove to be an ideal platform to investigate various optimisation strategies of the building operation in future, especially in the case of restrictive traditional building types where any retrofit solution needs a strong scientific backing of guaranteed success before practical implementation. In future, work will be done to further strengthen the Humidity Day concept and test the case of dehumidification by further working on some of the assumptions. Furthermore, sub-metering at the NGS will provide accurate data to help validate the findings, especially, the energy consumed by chillers and humidifiers during the winter months will give a required justification for the dehumidification figures obtained

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

Indoor air Quality and Its Effects on Health in Urban Houses of Indonesia: A case study of Surabaya

There is a possibility that the sick building syndrome has already spread widely among the newly constructed apartments in major cities of Indonesia. This study investigates the current conditions of indoor air quality, focusing especially on formaldehyde and TVOC, and their effects on health among occupants in the urban houses located in the city of Surabaya. A total of 471 respondents were interviewed and 82 rooms were measured from September 2017 to January 2018. The results indicated that around 50% of the respondents in the apartments showed some degrees of chemical sensitivity risk. More than 60% of the measured formaldehyde levels in the apartments exceeded the WHO standard, 0.08 ppm. The respondents living in rooms with higher mean formaldehyde values tended to have higher multiple chemical sensitivity risk scores. KEYWORDS: Indoor air quality, Sick building syndrome, QEESI, Formaldehyde, Developing countrie

Wood Science for Conservation of Cultural Heritage – Braga 2008

COST Action IE0601 "Wood Science for Conservation of Cultural Heritage" (www.woodculther.org) aims to improve the conservation of European wooden cultural heritage objects, by fostering research and interaction between researchers in various fields of wood science, conservators of wooden artworks, scientists from related fields. These proceedings contain the papers presented in the 2nd International Conference held in Braga (Portugal) 5-7/11/2008, dealing with themes such as material properties, biological degradation, characterization and measurement techniques, conservation, structures. This conference was patronized by the European Society for Wood Mechanics (ESWM), an informal body promoting wood mechanics in Europe by regular organisation of meetings through running COST Actions

Proceedings of the 9th Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design (ASCAAD) international conference 2021 (ASCAAD 2021): architecture in the age of disruptive technologies: transformation and challenges.

The ASCAAD 2021 conference theme is Architecture in the age of disruptive technologies: transformation and challenges. The theme addresses the gradual shift in computational design from prototypical morphogenetic-centered associations in the architectural discourse. This imminent shift of focus is increasingly stirring a debate in the architectural community and is provoking a much needed critical questioning of the role of computation in architecture as a sole embodiment and enactment of technical dimensions, into one that rather deliberately pursues and embraces the humanities as an ultimate aspiration

Procedures and Methodologies for the Control and Improvement of Energy-Environmental Quality in Construction

This Special Issue aims at providing the state-of-the-art on procedures and methodologies developed to improve energy and environmental performance through building renovation. We are greatly thankful to our colleagues building physics experts, building technology researchers, and urban environment scholars who contributed to this Special Issue, for sharing their original works in the field