Bioclimatic and Regenerative Design Guidelines for a Circular University Campus in India

To transform the negative impacts of buildings on the environment into a positive footprint, a radical shift from the current, linear ‘make-use-dispose’ practice to a closed-loop ‘make-use-return’ system, associated with a circular economy, is necessary. This research aims to demonstrate the possible shift to a circular construction industry by developing the first practical framework with tangible benchmarks for a ‘Circular University Campus’ based on an exemplary case study project, which is a real project development in India. As a first step, a thorough literature review was undertaken to demonstrate the social, environmental and economic benefits of a circular construction industry. As next step, the guideline for a ‘Circular University Campus’ was developed, and its applicability tested on the case study. As final step, the evolved principles were used to establish ‘Project Specific Circular Building Indicators’ for a student residential block and enhance the proposed design through bioclimatic and regenerative design strategies. The building’s performance was evaluated through computational simulations, whole-life carbon analysis and a circular building assessment tool. The results demonstrated the benefits and feasibility of bioclimatic, regenerative building and neighbourhood design and provided practical prototypical case study and guidelines which can be adapted by architects, planners and governmental institutions to other projects, thereby enabling the shift to a restorative, circular construction industry

Hungarian RF personal exposimetry survey on employees of elementary schools, kindergartens and day nurseries

A total of 105 full-day RF exposimetry measurements were made in Budapest. Volunteers belonging to one of three groups (teachers, kindergarten and day nursery employees, office workers) and additionally, telecommunication workers wore the exposimeters on their bodies and kept detailed activity diaries. New software was developed to automatize data processing, combine raw datasets with activity diaries and derive various statistical comparisons. It is an important point of this work that teachers and kindergarten caretakers spend their workdays close to children, receiving similar RF exposures, thus the inclusion such persons into the study also allows estimation of exposure of childre

RF personal exposimetry on employees of elementary schools, kindergartens and day nurseries as a proxy for child exposures

International audiencePersonal RF exposimetry has been in the focus of the bioelectromagnetics community in the last few years. With a few exceptions, exposimetry studies focused on adults, because measuring the exposure of children, one of the most important target groups, introduces many complications. The main feature of our study is to select teachers and kindergarten caretakers as volunteers. They are expected to receive similar exposure patterns as the children because they spend the workday close to them. Thus they can stand as proxies for estimation of exposures of children. Volunteers belonging to one of two groups (elementary school teachers, n = 31; employees of kindergartens and day nurseries, n = 50) in Hungarian cities received a Personal Exposimeter (PEM) for 24 h each. Only workdays, when the volunteers worked near children, were considered. 51 additional volunteers (office workers) were measured as controls. The volunteers wore the PEMs on their bodies. Those activities marked in the exposure diaries as work were further classified into 5 categories based on the level of certainty that they actually worked near children during that activity. Subsets of the full dataset were derived and compared based on this categorization. It was found that relaxation of the selection criteria often under- or overestimates exposure. The differences of estimation depend on the frequency band and sub-population: the kindergarten and teacher groups differ in this regard. For most frequency bands the majority of data points was below the detection limit. Derived child exposures are comparable to the worktime exposure of adults (control group)