Investigation into energy performance of a school building in a hot climate: Optimum of window-to-wall ratio.

Global attention is currently focussed on developing techniques to improve the thermal performance of buildings to provide indoor comfort with minimum reliance on energy load. Several studies have investigated building facade, materials used and other factors involved in building design. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of thermal insulation, shading devices, window-to-wall ratio (WWR) and a combination of these factors in a prototype school building design in the warm climate city of Taif, Saudi Arabia. The study used various methods classified into two main phases. The first phase involved on-site observation where both thermal imaging and regular cameras were used to examine the influence of orientation on glazing as a baseline. The second phase involved advanced software investigations with 2D AutoCAD, 3D Revit and computer modelling for energy evaluation and daylight factor. A detailed framework was introduced to examine current school buildings and to improve the future designs of prototype school buildings. The study revealed that a combination of applying thermal insulation along with minimising WWR is required in existing buildings within hot and dry regions. Furthermore, it was recommended that WWR should not exceed 35%, 25% and 20% for northwest, southeast and southwest building facades, respectively

Voluntary Local Review Framework to Monitor and Evaluate the Progress towards Achieving Sustainable Development Goals at a City Level: Buraidah City, KSA and SDG11 as A Case Study

Around the world, cities are on the front lines of sustainable development. They are responsible for more than 70% of global carbon emissions. Many of these cities are experiencing dangerous levels of pollution, underemployment, and health disparities. Since 2015, 193 countries have endorsed the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), intended to help address a wide range of challenges affecting cities and ultimately secure the resources for their next generations. All states are expected to present the national progress towards the SDGs through a Voluntary National Review (VNR). Despite the importance of the cities within this framework, only a handful of them worldwide have actively begun to review and assess progress towards these SDGs on a city scale. This paper seeks to develop a Voluntary Local Review (VLR) framework to assess and evaluate the progress of cities towards contributing to the SDGs. This framework has been developed by localizing the international and national frameworks to measure the performance of cities as they advance towards achieving the SDGs. Such a framework can serve as a tool for benchmarking progress on different aspects of sustainable development and help urban planners and policymakers prioritize policies and actions to improve urban quality of life. This framework is applied to monitor and evaluate the progress of the city of Buraidah in Saudi Arabia, as it strives towards achieving the targets of SDG11 (“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”).</jats:p

Advanced energy architectural configurations and its influence on the indoor environment in various climatic regions

One of the most important functions of buildings is to provide comfort with minimum reliance on energy consumption. Many research focuses on the physical part of the building, which has resulted in a lack of investigation considering design and configuration. After the announcement of the Saudi vision of 2030, which aims to improve building performance, the aim of this research is to investigate the influence of models and sub-models of complex architectural configurations in various climatic regions. This will not only have its impact in the kingdom of Saudi, but it will also benefit users and institutions globally. These models have not been investigated before in terms of energy performance and thermal comfort, which makes this research highly essential. The research will use TAS EDSL modelling, which is considered as one of the most powerful and advanced tools for predicting buildings’ energy performances. It can be seen that in all regions, the relationship between the indoor temperature and relative humidity has an inverse pattern. Having high relative humidity will make it difficult to achieve indoor comfort temperatures levels for the users with higher indoor air temperatures. This might require an increase in the indoor air velocity by natural pressure or even by mechanical means, such as fans. It will be concluded that linear and radial shapes are not recommended for extreme regions, whether they be hot or cold

Use of Underground Constructions Enhanced with Evaporative Cooling to Improve Indoor Built Environment in Hot Climate

Underground constructions (UGCs) have been used globally to accommodate a wide range of building usage, such as offices and shopping malls. Most of these constructions suffer from a lack of natural ventilation as well as daylight, as they are completely built under the surface of the earth. This has caused many issues related to discomfort, impacting the activity and the productivity of users. This study aimed to analyse the effect of the use of UGCs in hot regions, enhanced by partly elevated external walls which reach aboveground to ensure natural ventilation and daylight, with relatively small amounts of glazing to minimise the influence of solar heat gain. The study used a real built underground room with field measurements for indoor temperature and relative humidity. Moreover, the study used the computer tool EDSL TAS to simulate the performance of the model throughout the year after a field validation. It was concluded that the use of UGCs in hot climates should be encouraged as natural ventilation and daylight can decrease temperatures by 3 &deg;C in summer, and the utilisation of evaporative cooling can cool the indoor environment by nearly 12 &deg;C. Furthermore, heat transfer was highly affected by the external environment. It was found that the amount of heat transfer doubled in comparison between under and aboveground constructions. The use of small windows for ventilation caused high humidity, even in hot regions, during summer

Impact of Window to Wall Ratio on Energy Loads in Hot Regions: A Study of Building Energy Performance

The concern regarding local responsive building design has gained more attention globally as of late. This is due to the issue of the rapid increase in energy consumption in buildings for the purpose of heating and cooling. This has become a crucial issue in educational buildings and especially in schools. The major issue in school buildings in Saudi Arabia is that they are a form of prototype school building design (PSBD). As a result, if there is any concern in the design stage and in relation to the selection of building materials, this will spread throughout the region. In addition to that, the design is repeated regardless of the climate variation within the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This research will focus on the influence of the window to wall ratio on the energy load in various orientations and different climatic regions. The research will use the energy computer tool TAS Environmental Design Solution Limited (EDSL) to calculate the energy load as well as solar gain. During the visit to the sample schools, a globe thermometer will be used to monitor the globe temperature in the classrooms. This research introduces a framework to assist architects and engineers in selecting the proper window to wall ratio (WWR) in each direction within the same building based on adequate natural light with a minimum reliance on energy load. For ultimate WWR for energy performance and daylight, the WWR should range from 20% to 30%, depending on orientation, in order to provide the optimal daylight factor combined with building energy efficiency. This ratio can be slightly greater in higher altitude locations

Toward Sustainable Healthcare Facilities: An Initiative for Development of “Mostadam-HCF” Rating System in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia vision 2030 emphasizes the applications of sustainability concepts in all aspects of life in Saudi society. Accordingly, the Mostadam rating system for existing and new buildings was recently launched to achieve appropriate, sustainable building standards. In the medical field, sustainable healthcare facilities are an extension of the concept of sustainable buildings in terms of important sustainable healthcare parameters. Therefore, the sustainable development of healthcare facilities has great impacts on growing economic, social and environmental issues, which, in turn, improve Saudi society’s public health. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the urgent need for sustainable healthcare facilities to control the outbreak of such dangerous pandemics. Accordingly, the retrofitting of the existing healthcare facilities and the shift toward new sustainable ones have become an important objective of many countries worldwide. Currently, the concepts related to sustainable healthcare facilities are rapidly varying their scopes toward wider perspectives. Therefore, a new local rating system for healthcare facilities based on the potential and resources of sustainable healthcare facilities in Saudi Arabia should be developed. The present paper investigates the development of a new version of the Mostadam rating system, known here as “Mostadam-HCF”, in relation to the local Mostadam rating system and in accordance with the LEED version 4.1 (BD + C: Health-care). This important step can help the existing and the new healthcare facilities in Saudi Arabia to obtain, firstly, national accreditation and, consequently, to be internationally accredited. Moreover, the initiative of sustainable healthcare facilities can also help in fighting the current COVID-19 pandemic and the other possible future viruses in Saudi Arabia

Influence of Orientation in Complex Building Architecture in Various Climatic Regions in Winter

World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technolog

Households&rsquo; Energy Choices in Rural Pakistan

In the wake of the United Nation&rsquo;s Sustainable Development Goals&mdash;zero hunger and affordable modern/clean energy for all&mdash;many developing countries have taken serious steps in recent years to increase clean energy access for the rural population. The government of Pakistan has similarly made numerous efforts to promote the use of clean energy sources in the rural areas of the country. Therefore, this study examines rural households&rsquo; energy choices for cooking and lighting in Pakistan. In doing so, a comprehensive dataset is collected from three different districts of Pakistan between 2020 and 2021, and multivariate probit (MVP) model and Chi-square tests are employed. The Chi-square results indicate that the age, education level, and occupation of the household-head; household size and income; distance to market and wood source; and biogas system ownership are the significant factors affecting cooking choices. The MVP results show that an increase in education level, school-going children, access to credit facilities, and gender (female) are the key positive factors, whereas an increase in the distance to nearest market/road, household size, and age are the factors that negatively affect the likelihood of using clean energy sources for lighting. While comparing the propensity to use modern/clean energy fuels across the three districts, infrastructural development and literacy rate were found to be crucial factors

Structural Identification of a 90 m High Minaret of a Landmark Structure under Ambient Vibrations

This paper presents the operational modal analysis of a 90-m-high RC minaret of an iconic mosque considered as a landmark of the city. The minaret was monitored for three days with 11 tri-axial MEMS accelerometers. The purpose of the study was to observe the behavior, develop a representative finite element (FE) model, and establish baseline data for health monitoring studies. The modal properties were extracted using three operational modal analysis techniques (OMA): Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition (EFDD), Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI), and Natural Excitation Technique with Eigensystem Realization Algorithm (NExT-ERA). The first 10 identified modes were below 7 Hz. Eight modes out of the ten were bending-dominant, while the remaining two were torsion-dominant. A FE model was also developed in ETABS to ascertain and compare the response of the structure with the identified results. From the FE model, the modes corresponding to the first ten identified modes were considered for comparison with the identified frequencies from ambient monitoring. The maximum 7.71% error was observed between the experimental and numerical frequencies. The error was minimized by using the manual updating the material properties and adding the weight of nonstructural elements. The variation of identified modal frequencies with ambient temperature was observed to be linearly dependent to a reasonable degree. A general trend of decreasing identified frequencies was observed with the rise in temperature

Structural Identification of a 90 m High Minaret of a Landmark Structure under Ambient Vibrations

This paper presents the operational modal analysis of a 90-m-high RC minaret of an iconic mosque considered as a landmark of the city. The minaret was monitored for three days with 11 tri-axial MEMS accelerometers. The purpose of the study was to observe the behavior, develop a representative finite element (FE) model, and establish baseline data for health monitoring studies. The modal properties were extracted using three operational modal analysis techniques (OMA): Enhanced Frequency Domain Decomposition (EFDD), Stochastic Subspace Identification (SSI), and Natural Excitation Technique with Eigensystem Realization Algorithm (NExT-ERA). The first 10 identified modes were below 7 Hz. Eight modes out of the ten were bending-dominant, while the remaining two were torsion-dominant. A FE model was also developed in ETABS to ascertain and compare the response of the structure with the identified results. From the FE model, the modes corresponding to the first ten identified modes were considered for comparison with the identified frequencies from ambient monitoring. The maximum 7.71% error was observed between the experimental and numerical frequencies. The error was minimized by using the manual updating the material properties and adding the weight of nonstructural elements. The variation of identified modal frequencies with ambient temperature was observed to be linearly dependent to a reasonable degree. A general trend of decreasing identified frequencies was observed with the rise in temperature