Green Hotels ::an overview

In this article, we adopt a real estate perspective and explore the sustainability implications of hotels. First, we provide a background on sustainability, describe how it relates to the hotel sector and synthesize literature on the economic implications of sustainability. Further, we provide and explain trends on sustainability certifications, LEED in particular, in the US context

Suitability of neighborhood-scale massing models for daylight performance evaluation.

Access to daylight in buildings is the combined effect of a building’s own physical attributes along with its surrounding physical context. There is thus growing interest among researchers to extend the use of building performance simulation (BPS) tools for daylight performance evaluation, not just for an individual building, but to the neighborhood scale and beyond. In the design process of neighborhoods, massing models are often utilized and are a pivotal early design-stage work-product. These models are typically simple and delineate broad geometric dimensions of built enclosures. They are thus attractive for fast early design stage assessment using BPS tools and maybe used to determine daylight access potential. However, at this stage, the designer may have limited and imprecise information regarding the building façade, the vital element for daylight intake and distribution in the building interior. In this study, we assess the dependability of simple massing models for comparative indoor daylight assessments of neighborhood forms. Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI) metric based performance values were calculated for five neighborhood design options using common practice for façade related inputs in early design stage simulation models and then ranked in decreasing order of performance. A virtual progression of the design-process was then carried out to develop multiple plausible façade design solutions for all proposed massing schemes. The main finding of this study is that significant changes can be observed in neighbourhood rankings when increasing the degree of detail in the façade design solutions. While the highest performing designs were found to maintain their ranks, the rankings of other projects shifted considerably when façade related information was supplied. This work informs on the possibility of erroneous design decisions resulting from simplified façade inputs in early design stage models and fosters the growing discussion on appropriate utilization of BPS tools for informing design decisions

Boston Hospitality Review: Winter 2019

TABLE OF CONTENTS: "Training: The Necessity of Error Management Training in the Hospitality Industry" by Priyanko Guchait; "Trends: Green Hotels: An Overview" by Minu Agarwal and Prashant Das; "Tourism: Panacea or peril? The implications of Neolocalism as a more intrusive form of tourism" by Makarand Mody and Kyle Koslowsky; "Restaurants: How Can Single-Unit Restaurants Strive for Powerful Online Presence?" by Leora Lanz and Jenna Berry; "Retention: Why Hoteliers Stay and Go: Future Oriented Thinking" by Sean McGinley; "Service Recovery: Failure is Not Fatal: Actionable Insights on Service Failure and Recovery for the Hospitality Industry" by Lisa C. Wan and Elisa Chan; "Research: A Detailed Study of the Expected and Actual Use of Hotel Amenities" by Chekitan S. Dev and Prateek Kumar

Examining Building Design Decisions Under Long Term Weather Variability and Microclimatic Effects: A case-based exploratory study

Thermal building simulation currently uses Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data to guide the design decision-making process or for compliance with energy standards. TMY data usually excludes extremes and in many cases are gathered from microclimatic contexts that are not sufficiently representative of the project sites (e.g., airports), adding uncertainty in the analyses. To enable a quantification of uncertainty due to weather by exploring a wide variety of atypical weather conditions, the authors have previously proposed synthetic weather data for building simulation. This is a suite of weather time series, generated from typical weather data that includes heat waves and atypical peak temperatures. In this paper, we used this synthetic weather to examine the effect of considering atypical conditions on design decisions. We also compared the impact of including ‘city-modified’ weather data on retrofit decisions using urban microclimate simulation. We found that it may not be viable to pre-select a subset of weather data for all buildings at a given location. Rather, multiple weather data sets may be simulated based on the design strategies and performance criteria of importance. In other words, an extreme condition/year for one building isn’t necessarily the same for another. For example, in the case study presented, heat island effect was found to be a likely hindrance to night time cooling. This paper informs the debate on the necessity of expanding the current energy building analyses to a broader consideration of weather variability and more realistic urban microclimate characterization

Impact of facade details on the reliability of performance-based decisions for early-stage neighborhood designs

Neighborhood-scale projects often commence with the conceptualization of several massing-schemes as potential design solutions. There is growing interest in using building performance simulation (BPS) to evaluate and rank such conceptual stage schemes in order to choose ones that best support performance goals related to energy and indoor comfort. However, such evaluations are typically made at a time of deficiency in information on building level attributes that influence performance, raising questions regarding their usefulness for reliable decision-making. In this thesis, a new method, that builds upon existing risk assessment methods, is introduced to calculate the risk of performance loss faced by a conceptual stage BPS user/decision maker (DM). The proposed method considers three sources of risk of performance loss (1) reversal in ranks of design proposals (2) latency effect or a delayed discovery of performance gain (3) insufficient performance gain or loss of expected performance gain. These losses result from a design choice made between competing design proposals based on conceptual design stage BPS results that would be rendered invalid under future design development possibilities. To observe these losses and estimate the risk, a virtual progression of the design process is done through incremental facade levels of detail (fLOD) resulting in several future design scenarios. The resulting risk value combines the overall chance and magnitude of loss in the future design scenarios. It is further categorized as high' or 'low' risk based on the number of design paths that lead to future design scenarios with unacceptable loss. This risk assessment method was tested by running a number of relative performance comparisons between pairs of competing neighborhood design proposals (N=780), based on three commonly used indoor environment related performance metrics: spatial daylight autonomy (sDA), annual heating and annual cooling demand. The results led to several important findings. First, while many performance evaluations lead to risk-free decisions, the number of high-risk cases was large enough (e.g. 1 in 5 comparisons on sDA ) to suggest reconsideration of conceptual stage decision-making practices for projects where several design alternatives need to be ranked. Second, the likelihood of high-risk cases regarding performance loss depends on the metric, and becomes irrelevant only when design alternatives differ significantly in their evaluation outcome already at a low level of detail (LOD). Third, rank assignments based on either daylight (sDA) or annual cooling demand were found to be afflicted by all three sources of risk - rank reversal, latency effect, and insufficient performance gain, in annual heating demand evaluations, almost all cases of high-risk were due to latency effect. The aim of this risk assessment method is to link the reliability in decision making to fLOD present in the BPS models used for the performance evaluation. An original visualization aid is proposed to facilitate the DMâs understanding of risk, and identify the appropriate BPS model fLOD for making reliable conceptual stage decisions. A design competition case study was used to test usefulness of this approach in assessing risk, when going through an actual design process. This thesis also presents a novel approach for evaluating decision-making practices in an experimental manner in the BPS domain that can inform future policy making

Green Hotels: An Overview

Sustainability is a crucial component of business, yet hotels have been slow to adapt. This article explores LEED and BREEAM certifications and how it positively impacts real estate, hotels, and the planet

Influence of façade details on early design decisions regarding daylight performance of neighborhoods

Neighborhood form and building facade design are key drivers of indoor daylight performance. Architectural design at the neighborhood scale starts with massing scheme proposals and other design specifications including façade design are typically enriched sequentially in subsequent design stages. In this study, we simulate multiple pairs of early design massing schemes and compare their daylight performance at sequentially increasing façade level of detail (fLOD). We found the design-decision between two schemes to be more robust at high window-wall ratios (WWR) as the difference in the estimated daylight performance of two massing schemes was amplified at high WWR. At medium and low WWR, the performance difference between the massing schemes, and the resulting design-decision depended on the façade design choices such as the distribution of openings across different orientations and balcony design. Also, at high stringency in decision criteria (i.e. requirement of higher margin of difference in performance), higher fLODs were found to improve the accuracy of decision

Case Study - Office and Residential - Geneva Urban

This data set should contain several distinct types of files for a case study based in Geneva. The files are either inputs (IDF), or outputs (CSV, EIO, etc.). The weather files are in a related data entry (TO BE LINKED). The files have mostly been zipped based on dates. The buildings model correspond to real plots in Geneva, but the simulations are not meant to represent the actual buildings that stand there. The models are based on estimated constructions from the era of the building. While the heating load of the buildings should fall within the same order of magnitude as recorded values for Geneva, it will not match the bills of the real building that stands on a particular site. The weather file name is included in the name of the output. Consult the weather file dataset (TO BE LINKED) for an explanation of the naming scheme

Efficient Organic Photovoltaics with Improved Charge Extraction and High Short-Circuit Current

Exciton generation, dissociation, free carrier transport, and charge extraction play an important role in the short-circuit current (<i>J</i>_sc) and power conversion efficiency of an organic bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cell (SC). Here we study the impact of band offset at the interfacial layer and the morphology of active layer on the extraction of free carriers. The effects are evaluated on an inverted BHJ SC using zinc oxide (ZnO) as a buffer layer, prepared via two different methods: ZnO nanoparticle dispersed in mixed solvents (ZnO A) and sol–gel method (ZnO B). The device with ZnO A buffer layer improves the charge extraction and <i>J</i>_sc. The improvement is due to the better band offset and morphology of the blend near the ZnO A/active layer interface. Further, the numerical analysis of current–voltage characteristics illustrates that the morphology at the ZnO A/active layer interface has a more dominant role in improving the performance of the organic photovoltaic than the band offset