Visualizing Energy Consumption of Radiators

Heating is a significant expenditure of many households today but the actual power consumption of the heating devices are seldom recognized. To help people understand and reflect upon their domestic energy consumption, we have designed an electrical radiator that emits heat entirely from light bulbs. This appliance responds to temperature changes in the room via sensors. The idea was to combine the product semantics of lamps and radiators and direct focus on the latter neglected product category. We argue that by re-designing domestic appliances adding means to visualize energy consumption in engaging and interesting ways it is possible to make energy utilization less abstract and easier to comprehend

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour

User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’. Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energyor other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed

Ambient Learning Displays: lecture series and results from a participatory design study

Börner, D., Kalz, M., & Specht, M. (2012). Ambient Learning Displays: lecture series and results from a participatory design study. In M. Specht, J. Multisilta, & M. Sharples (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning 2012 (pp. 232-235). October, 16-18, 2012, Helsinki, Finland.Emerging from pervasive and mobile technologies, ambient displays present information and media in the periphery of the user. Thereby the displays situated and interacting in the close proximity are an addition to existing personal interfaces in the foreground, while the user attention can always move from one to the other and back. Especially the ability to deliver contextualised and personalised information in authentic situations fosters ambient displays as an instrument for learning. However the actual design of ambient displays for learning proves to be difficult, as the technical implementations as well as the underlying instructional principles are still immature. The paper presents the main constituents of a lecture series on the use of ambient displays for learning and a first participatory design study conducted during two consecutive lecture sessions. The results show a variety of usable ambient display types, possible learning scenarios, and specific design proposals towards ambient learning displays

Visualizing the exergy destructed in exergy delivery chain in relation to human thermal comfort with ExFlow

Exergy analysis is an important tool to fully appreciate the usability of energy at different levels and has been widely applied in the building system analysis domain. It has became more useful as low temperature heating and high temperature cooling began to attract more attention both in Europe and the United States. Using low-grade energy to supply for these systems have, in return, led to an increase in awareness of low exergy (LowEx) system designs. The possibility of modeling the last missing link in the system that is to delivery thermal comfort, the human body, have therefore became a topic that increasingly draws the attention of many more researchers. Due to the complexity of these human body exergy models, it is very rare for these models to be linked back to building systems and produce an exergy efficiency for occupants’ thermal comfort. Attempting to fill in the blanks of overall system exergy efficiency on delivery occupant thermal comfort, we have developed a visualization algorithm that could visually assess the exergy efficiency in comfort delivery. Using the ExFlow tool, it is much clearer and easier to determine the relationship of how much primary energy input is eventually converted to the energy that is used to condition for the occupants’ comfort

Implementation of building a thermal model to improve energy efficiency of the central heating system - a case study

This paper presents the concept of an innovative control of a central heating system in a multifamily building based on the original thermodynamic model, the resulting architecture of the control system, and the originally designed and manufactured wireless temperature sensors for thermal zones. The novelty of this solution is the developed layers of the control system: distributed measurement and correction analysis, which is based on the existing infrastructure and the local HVAC controller. This approach allows for the effective use of the measured temperature data from thermal zones and finally sending the value of the calculated correction of settings to the controller. Moreover, in the analytical layer, a model was also implemented that calculates the necessary amount of energy based on data from the subsystem of temperature sensors located in the thermal zones of the building. The use of the algorithmic strategy presented in this paper extends the functionality and significantly improves the energy efficiency of the existing, classic, reference heating control algorithm by implementing additional control loops. Additionally, it enables integration with demand-side response systems. The presented concept was successfully tested, achieving real energy savings for heating by 12%. These results are described in a case-study format. The authors believe that this concept can be used in other buildings and thus will have a positive impact on the energy savings used to maintain thermal comfort in buildings and significantly reduce CO2 emissions

Multi-objective optimization for school buildings retrofit combining artificial neural networks and life cycle cost

The renovation of a school building should be regarded as a process of combining a number of variables and objectives, sometimes conflicting, including energy, indoor environmental quality and costs (initial, operational and maintenance), on a search for an "optimum solution". This multi-objective optimization procedure is particularly important in a time of severe economic crisis, with few available financial resources and, as such, their management and the investment decisions require great prudence from the decision maker. In this research a methodology to optimize the insulation thickness of external walls and roof, in the retrofit of two school buildings, is proposed. The school performance was defined considering two objectives: the annual heating load and the discomfort in the classrooms due to overheating. The calculation of the performance functions implies an annual simulation of the building and Artificial Neural Networks were training to approximate them. The minimization of the Life Cycle Cost of external walls and roof retrofit allowed the economic optimization of the insulation width

District data management, modelling and visualization via interoperability

Data management has been one of the most interesting research fields within the smart city framework over the last years, with the aim of optimizing energy saving at district level. This topic involves the creation of a 3D city model considering heterogeneous datasets, such as Building Information Models (BIMs), Geographical Information Systems (GISs) and System Information Models (SIMs), taking into account both buildings and the energy network. Through the creation of a common platform, the data sharing was allowed starting from the needs of the users, such as the public administrator, the building manager and the energy professional. For this reason, the development of a District Information Modelling (DIM) methodology for the data management, related to the energy saving and CO2 emission, is considered the focus of this paper. It also presents a specific tool developed for the comparison of energy data in a selected district: the Benchmarking Tool