Resilient cooling strategies – A critical review and qualitative assessment

The global effects of climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of extreme events such as heatwaves and power outages, which have consequences for buildings and their cooling systems. Buildings and their cooling systems should be designed and operated to be resilient under such events to protect occupants from potentially dangerous indoor thermal conditions. This study performed a critical review on the state-of-the-art of cooling strategies, with special attention to their performance under heatwaves and power outages. We proposed a definition of resilient cooling and described four criteria for resilience—absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, restorative capacity, and recovery speed —and used them to qualitatively evaluate the resilience of each strategy. The literature review and qualitative analyses show that to attain resilient cooling, the four resilience criteria should be considered in the design phase of a building or during the planning of retrofits. The building and relevant cooling system characteristics should be considered simultaneously to withstand extreme events. A combination of strategies with different resilience capacities, such as a passive envelope strategy coupled with a low-energy space-cooling solution, may be needed to obtain resilient cooling. Finally, a further direction for a quantitative assessment approach has been pointed out

Education for Environmental Citizenship and Responsible Environmental Behaviour

The notion of Environmental Citizenship embodies behaviour – an actively involved citizen who exercises his/her environmental rights and obligations in the private and public spheres. Education for Environmental Citizenship implies behavioural change; its goal is to facilitate an individual’s intellectual growth (cognitive domain) and emotional capacity (affective domain) that may lead to a critical and actively engaged individual. Human behaviour is overwhelmingly sophisticated, and what shapes pro-environmental behaviour is complex and context specific. Furthermore, empirical research indicates a discrepancy between possessing environmental knowledge and environmentally supportive attitudes and behaving pro-environmentally. The point of departure of this chapter is that the social and psychological study of behaviour has much to inform the study of environmental behaviour and, deriving from this, to inform regarding the type of education towards behaviour/action in the goal of sustainable socioecological transformation. The chapter focuses on internal (psychosocial) factors. It presents selected models regarding factors influencing behavioural decisions that are acknowledged as influential theoretical frameworks for investigating pro-environmental behaviour, as well as various theories that inform these models. These are categorised into knowledge-based models; attitude-, value- and norm-oriented models; skills, self-efficacy and situational factors; and new approaches to environmental behaviour models. The chapter concludes with suggestions for Education for Environmental Citizenship deriving from the various models

Towards the development of a coupled model for district simulation: buildings, energy systems and microclimate co-simulation

International audienceThis paper introduces a methodology of a coupling procedure based on a detailed district energy model from urban microclimate and a second one with a detailed description of the entire energy system of the district. The microclimatic model is able to represent the thermo-radiative and mass flow balances. The transient energy system simulation platform is capable to consider the entire energy system of the district (including thermal and/or electrical grids and their respective energy storage/production on a central or local level). In parallel, both tools allow to compute the thermal processes of the buildings concurrently. Thus, considering the building as the boundary between both tools, we examine it as the key coupling parameter. The spatial and temporal complexities and their impact on the simulation results are analyzed in a first step in order to validate the coupling methodology. In parallel, modified meteorological data that account for the urban form were obtained in offline coupling. Finally, we demonstrate some of the possible outcomes through a real study of a newly refurbished district in La Rochelle, France.Cet article introduit une méthodologie de couplage basée sur un modèle énergétique de quartier détaillé allant du microclimat urbain au réseau énergétique. Le modèle microclimat/bâtiment vise à prédire les bilans thermo-radiatifs et massiques. La plateforme de simulation du système énergétique prend en compte les réseaux thermiques et/ou électriques ainsi que le stockage et la production d'énergie centralisée ou locale. Les deux outils intègrent les modèles thermiques de bâtiments. Ainsi, en considérant le bâtiment comme la frontière entre les deux outils, ce dernier apparaît comme le paramètre clé pour le couplage des deux approches. Les complexités spatiales et temporelles et leur impact sur les résultats de la simulation sont analysés dans une première étape afin de valider la méthodologie de couplage. En parallèle, les données météorologiques modifiées par l'environnement et la morphologie urbaine seront obtenues par un couplage hors ligne. Enfin nous illustrons cette approche à partir de résultats de simulations obtenus pour l'étude du quartier « La Cité des Géraniums » à La Rochelle (France), quartier entièrement rénové récemment

An integrated approach to quantify the potential local climate mitigation of a district energy network compared to individual air conditioning systems.

International audienceThe transition from building to district scale is supported numerically by the nascent field of Urban Building Energy Modelling. However, the concurrent assessment of building energy demand and local climate conditions is sparsely studied explicitly, while there is a lack of integrated tools embedding the modelling of district energy systems. This article presents a developed coupled model to account for building energy needs, urban heat island and site-specific effects, along with the district energy system operation. To illustrate the approach, we examine the mitigation potential of a district network under projected climate conditions for a city with an oceanic climate. Key Innovations Synchronous coupling methodology at urban scale. Explicit modelling of urban building stock and local microclimate

Optimized design of low-rise commercial buildings under various climates – Energy performance and passive cooling strategies

International audienc

Modélisation des interactions ville-climat-énergie

National audienc

Quantifying the Impact of Urban Microclimate in Detailed Urban Building Energy Simulations

International audienceThe study focuses on the development and illustration of the interactions between urban microclimate and district scale building simulation through a micro co-simulation approach. A zonal microclimatic model developed to serve the needs of the district scale is coupled with an Urban Building Energy Model aiming a twofold objective: enhancement of the boundary conditions and adaptation of the built environment to heat island mitigation measures. The proposed coupling strategy is analysed and presented through a case study of a street canyon. The initial outcomes exhibit deviations between the standalone and the coupled models

Evaluation of a microclimate simulation tool on an experimental mock-up and passive cooling strategies assessment

International audienceThis paper presents an experimental verification of a coupled simulation model originating from EnviBatE (microclimate tool) and the urban building energy model (UBEM) Dimosim. Based on synchronous coupling techniques, the microclimate model considers detailed solar radiations and airflow calculations as well as a zonal model for discretized canopy air nodes and building nodes. A reduced-scale experimental mock-up provides the possibility to carry out the evaluation of the tool against on-site measurements. The mock-up consists of five rows of empty concrete blocks on a 1:10 scale with an aspect ratio of 1.2. For calibration and validation purposes, we collected measurements of surface and air temperatures, incident solar radiation and incident longwave radiation coming from the sky. Then, we compareoutdoor and indoor temperature of the experimental mock-up and the numerical model for a monitoring period of 26 days. The analysis highlights the capabilities of the coupled model to represent the urban canyon effects. This study allows quantifying the effects of reflective coatings in order to reduce local overheating on a neighborhood scale