Energy-Efficient Building Design for a Tropical Climate: A Field Study on the Caribbean Island Curaçao

Based on an extensive literature review on passive building designs for tropical climates, seven energy-efficient building design principles for tropical climate areas were deduced. These are: 1. To orientate a building design in such a direction that it protects from excessive solar radiation; 2. To accommodate for indoor natural ventilation; 3. That it makes maximal use of indirect instead of direct natural light; 4, That it reduces the amount of heat transmission through the roof as much as possible by natural ventilation between roof and ceiling and by lowering the roof surface temperature; 5. By preventing the use of high thermal mass materials; 6. By reducing through the exterior walls as much as possible heat transmission by e.g., preventing direct sunlight on the external walls and applying reflective paints on the external walls and; 7. By creating outdoor and transition spaces such as balconies, terraces atriums and corridors. The insights from the literature review were used as input to conduct a field study to evaluate the practice of applying passive building design principles. To this end, for 626 buildings on the Caribbean island Curaçao, it was investigated to what extent the recommended passive design principles for tropical climates were actually applied. Based on the results of the field study, several recommendations are made to improve the practice of applying passive building principles

Translate the Cradle to Cradle Principles for a Building

Abstract Various guidelines for Cradle to Cradle in the built environment were established since 1992. However, it's not clear how the Cradle to Cradle principles can be translated to the realization of a building. This paper contains information from literature with a focus on applying the Cradle to Cradle principles in building design and -construction. Also results of interviews with experts and directly involved stakeholders, about applying the Cradle to Cradle principles in the built environment will be provided. Specifically a number of aspects and desired results will be addressed, which seem to be essential in the realization of a building

Development of a bridge circularity assessment framework to promote resource efficiency in infrastructure projects

Given the predominant use of virgin materials and the creation of vast amounts ofwaste in the construction sector, increasing its resource efficiency could result in alarge improvement in overall use of resources. Bridges are a logical target for increas-ing resource efficiency, not only because of the large amount of materials involved butespecially because a considerable number of bridges are demolished because of chang-ing functional demands rather than technical failure. Furthermore, climate changeincreases future uncertainty and the likelihood of functionally motivated demolitions,which potentially exacerbates the creation of waste. Currently, it is not possible tomeasure and quantify the resource efficiency of bridge designs. In this study, a frame-work is presented that combines four indicators based o n the principles of the CircularEconomy. The four indicators are: (1) Design Input,(2)Resource Availability,(3)Adapt-ability, and (4) Reusability. Each indicator is further broken down into multiple sub-indicators. To test the usefulness of the proposed framework, it was applied to two real-world Dutch case studies. In addition, uncertainty and sensitivity analyses were con-ducted to determine the robustness of the indicator to changes in the design parame-ters and the weighting method used. Validation of the framework has shown that thisbridge-specific circularity indicator is useful for determining the level of resource effi-ciency in terms of material use. This will allow clients to use resource efficiency, orcircularity, as a selection criterion in the procurement process. This article met therequirements for a gold—gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges