Horizontal earth-to-air heat exchanger in Imola, Italy. A 30-month-long monitoring campaign.

The present paper reports the results of a 30-month-long monitoring campaign of a EAHX (earth-to-air heat exchanger) system installed in a school building in Imola (ITA). The horizontal EAHX is divided into three fields for a total of 32 buried pipes. The system pre-treats the inlet air of three dedicated AHUs. The analysis follows a consolidate methodology used in a previous shorter monitoring of the first Imola’s field that was already published. In this study, a comparison between different years of monitoring is introduced, together with the soil temperature trends of the first field

The influence of different hourly typical meteorological years on dynamic simulation of buildings

This paper presents a parametric study on the effect of different TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) datasets on the results of energy dynamic simulation. The analysis was carried out running the software Design Builder with EnergyPlus code on a sample residential building located in three Italian cities and using two different TMY data sets: EnergyPlus and CTI (Italian ThermoTechnical Committee). As a support of the simulation results to be confirmed to a larger scale (the whole Italian territory), an analysis on the two TMY data sets was carried out by calculating CDH (Cooling Degree Hours) and HDD (Heating Degree Days) for 21 Italian locations together with annual global horizontal radiation and average annual mean daily wind velocity. The discrepancies found between the software data set and the more updated and locally validated CTI data set undermine the accuracy of simulation results hence flawing the energy performance assessment criteria based on those results

Long-Range Spatial Distribution of Single Aluminum Sites in Zeolites

[Image: see text] How aluminum distributes during synthesis and rearranges after processing within the zeolite framework is a central question in heterogeneous catalysis, as it determines the structure and location of the catalytically active sites of the one of the most important classes of industrial catalysts. Here, exploiting the dipolar interaction between paramagnetic metal ions, we derive the spatial distribution of single aluminum sites within the ZSM-5 zeolite framework in the nanometer range, in polycrystalline samples lacking long-range order. We use a Monte Carlo approach to validate the findings on a pristine ZSM-5 sample and demonstrate that the method is sensitive enough to monitor aluminum redistribution induced in the framework by chemical stress

Integrated approach to sustainable building design programming

This paper aims at analysing the relationship between aesthetic and technological aspects in the design process. ‘Sustainability’ is often a label associated mainly to technological systems aimed at achieving energy efficiency, without considering architectural quality of spaces or environmental and sustainable performances as a holistic approach. Since buildings are working as systems and not as simple sums of elements, this paper proposes an integrated building design methodology, which embeds and merges technological, environmental and esthetical aspects. To this end, the paper presents the design teaching and research experience carried out with the students of final atelier of the Master of Sustainability, at the Polytechnic of Turin in 2014. In this atelier students were asked to design a building for the Architecture Faculty for The University of Melbourne. During this final atelier, a number of tools were applied throughout the overall design development to helps students in developing projects able to integrate aesthetic, environmental and technological aspects. For instance, one of these tools was the site microclimate matrix, which is a valid instrument for precisely defining master plans organizations, or placing volumetric solutions on sites, following a decision making process based on site-specific functional, technological and environmental aspects. This tool, as well as others that were adopted in the atelier, demonstrated to provide students the ability of developing projects characterised by efficient technical solution and high creative architectural designs