Sustainability Tools for the Assessment of Construction Materials and Buildings

The construction industry, contributing to about 9% of the European Union's GDP, has played a significant influential role in the development of the energy strategy of Europe and is also anticipated to be an important contributor in its successful implementation (EC, 2016). Holistic sustainability assessment tools that are able to evaluate and optimise the environmental performance of construction materials and buildings are considered a key for the development of advanced building designs and use of sustainable building materials and elements and green energy- efficient systems that will raise high the sustainability level of the European built environment. The aim of this work is the thorough explanation of the standardised LCA methodology, and the introduction of the approach of EcoHestia, a comprehensive building sustainability assessment tool. In view of that, the current legislation addressing the construction industry, as well as the state-of-the- art Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools that are used for the sustainability assessment and optimisation of construction materials and buildings are also presented. Furthermore, through the employment of EcoHestia, the environmental impact of a case study building is defined, also providing a detailed breakdown of the contribution of each construction material in the overall environmental performance of the building. The analysis of the results has not only determined on the construction materials of the building that are most harmful to the natural resources and the environment, but also showcased the effectiveness and added value of utilizing this approach in moving forward towards a more sustainable green building sector

Integration of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for sustainable constructions

The construction industry and the scientific community continue to seek for innovative approaches that can estimate the level of sustainability to be achieved at the end of the project from the early design stages. One of the tools developed for this purpose is Building Information Modelling (BIM), which represents the state- of- the- art tool for bringing together different expertise and achieving optimal designs at an early design stage for the maximisation of their impact. However, the level of the prospect of this tool has not been fully exploited. This paper integrates BIM with an established methodology for assessing a product's or a system's environmental performance- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)- in an attempt to maximise the benefits from this synergy and achieve the most sustainable constructions. The impact from the integration of these two valuable tools is presented for a water supply system using case studies for a range of different materials. Comparison of a modern Vernetztes Polyethylen (VPE) water supply system against two systems made from traditional materials (steel and copper) was made. The results of this study show that a VPE water supply system performs 87% better than the steel system, and 88% better than a copper water supply system in terms of climate change, while the carbon dioxide emissions released during the production of a VPE system are almost the one tenth of traditional materials water supply systems

Introduction to star-tup creation for the smart ecoefficient built environment

This chapter starts by briefly reviewing worrying evidence concerning Earth?s environment. The importance of entrepreneurship is highlighted as a way not only to mobilize the energy of young people in developed countries for a sustainability based new economy. But also to tackle the despair of young people in poor countries that could end in terrorist actions. Dynamics of start-up creation are briefly reviewed. The stigma on startup failure is also briefly addressed. The importance of start-up creation for the smart eco-efficient built environment is highlighted.  An outline of the book is included

The relationship between quality defects and the thermal performance of buildings

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: The relationship between quality defects and the thermal performance of buildings journaltitle: Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2017.08.029 content_type: article copyright: © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Female Representation and Development : A case study of the gender-sensitive developmental outcomes of female representation in the Rwandan parliament

The aim of this thesis is to examine the relation between women’s representation and gender-sensitive development, or women-friendly issues. This is done through a case study of Rwanda, a country that has faced rapid development and increase in women representatives in parliament which makes the country unique and useful for this study. The thesis focuses on two things, establishing a correlation between female representation and gender-sensitive development, and examining the causality between the two as well as investigating other possible factors that may have contributed to the development in Rwanda. While previous research on Rwanda focus more on the relation between female representation and democracy this thesis will focus on female representation and development. The thesis finds that there is a correlation in time between the increase in women in parliament in Rwanda and gender-sensitive development. It also establishes that the progress in Rwanda is unique in relation to other countries in the region with lower numbers of female representation. Furthermore, the thesis finds that despite arguments of gender equality being used as a disguise for authoritarianism in Rwanda, gender equality may still lead to development even if it does not lead to democracy. The thesis comes to the conclusion that  two factors in particular have contributed to the progress on gender-sensitive development. First, the specific situation in post-genocide Rwanda where the population consisted of 70 percent women   and the fact that women took on traditionally male roles in politics and economics. They also created the Forum of Women Parliamentarians [Forum des Femmes Rwandaises Parlementaires] (FFRP) which focused on mainstreaming gender equality into Rwandan politics and promoting women’s rights. Second, the determination of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and President Paul Kagame to include women and promote women’s rights. These factors both play a part in the great progress Rwanda has faced when it comes to gender-sensitive development. While the thesis suggest that the political process and inclusion of women in the Rwandan parliament is an important part in this progress it does not fully isolate the causality nor ignore that other factors might also have affected the outcomes. Hence, further research would have to be made to identify the mechanisms which has had the most effect for the development in Rwanda.

Improving the video streaming backend with on-the-fly format conversion and cloud storage

Online advanced media streaming services using HTTP adaptive stream-ing are increasingly popular. However in practice, the multi-protocol, multi-format nature of adaptive streaming creates a lot of engineering eort andcosts for the operators, in the storage and preparation of the dierentformats. In this work, we acknowledge these issues and we study a stream-ing setup that can address these. Such streaming setup consist of a backendcloud storage and a processing node that generates streaming presentationsfor different devices on-the-fly. We analyse the streaming setup and itsperformance by testing in cloud deployments. Through this evaluation, weidentify the performance limitations of the setup, imposed by the transferof data between the object storage and the processing node. We propose anew backend storage caching scheme, based on rarely used existing featureof dref in the specication of the MPEG-4 standard. Experimental resultsshow that the proposed scheme can improve the streaming performance,such as reduced latency and increased outgoing traffic volume towards theclientsElectrical Engineer | Embedded System

Numerical data on heat flux of a novel controlled-temperature double skin façade

Hourly heat flux for variant boundary conditions of a novel controlled-temperature double skin façade (DSF) building element in a two- dimensional time- dependent study was determined. The building element is subjected to boundary conditions, characterizing different orientations (azimuth 0°, 90°, 180°, 270°) and climatic conditions of the four seasons. This data article provides detailed numerical data on the hourly heat flux, temperatures attained at the exterior and within the building element for six different geometries and for the variant boundary conditions under study. The external boundary conditions were determined with the use of the PVGIS tool, corrected in accordance to the sol-air temperature equation. The numerical simulation studies were performed with the use of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool Comsol Multiphysics [2]