Innovative Photovoltaic Translucent Components for the Building Envelope

International directives that regulates buildings energy efficiency and environmental sustainability establish strict parameters for the construction of a new generation of “Zero Energy Buildings” indicating transmittance limits for building envelope components and encouraging the use of renewable sources. In this sense, the PV sector aims at the definition of novel efficient solutions for the integration in the building envelope, standing out for their multifunctional features. After an overview on the main PV technologies and building integrated applications, focusing on semi-transparent envelope solutions, the paper shows the results of a research that is being carried out at the Department of Architecture of the University of Palermo, aimed to define innovative solutions for the construction of photovoltaic and energy efficient translucent building envelopes. In particular, the research focuses on the optimization of glassblock panels in terms of thermal insulation, light transmittance, energy production and mechanical resistance. New configurations of glassblock were designed in order to reduce its U value and integrate 3rd generation PV technologies for the production of green energy. Furthermore, a dry assembly system has been designed for the construction of translucent prestressed panels made of DSC integrated glassblocks that are able to guarantee high levels of resistance to horizontal actions and to build translucent, photovoltaic and efficient building envelopes even in dry, tropical and temperate areas or in unfavourable light conditions

Exploring the influence of contemporary facade design on occupant satisfaction: a preliminary study in office buildings

This paper describes the preliminary findings of a post-occupancy evaluation campaign conducted on contemporary and energy-efficient office buildings with different façades treatments. The aim is to investigate occupants’ comfort and perceived productivity and to observe to what extent the space appearance and the façade design play a role in the ultimate user’s satisfaction and overall comfort. Two Swiss office buildings with different vertical enclosures are considered for this preliminary study: one has regular-shaped windows and regular blinds while the other presents a double-skin façade with a coloured silk-printed pattern partially covering the external pane and semi-transparent internal roller blinds. The results reported in this paper relate to an on-line extensive survey distributed among the buildings occupants to provide a global estimation of the comfort and perception they experience in their office. Findings suggest that in case of high dissatisfaction with some environmental factors, these influence strongly people’s overall comfort evaluation but not the self-rated productivity. However, when comfort ratings are less critical –though not optimal-, overall comfort as well as perceived productivity are more strongly correlated to the pleasantness of the space than to the environmental factors. Nevertheless, in the case of patterned glazing, the façade design has a low influence on comfort perception. The study suggests that further research should be conducted, especially to look at façade designs that play a greater role in determining the appearance and/or a certain level of personal environmental control in a workspace

Comfort, climatic background and adaptation time: first insights from a post-occupancy evaluation in multicultural workplaces

One of the effects of globalization and work mobility is the increasing multiculturalism in the workplace. While contemporary design policies for energy efficiency and comfort regulations are moving towards the adoption of models customized for local communities, consideration on the coexistence of people with different origins is underestimated in the current comfort debate. The aim of this study is to show whether building occupants' comfort rating can be affected by their climatic background as well as their duration of living in the current country of residence. A post-occupancy evaluation (POE) was carried out in two office buildings located in Switzerland accounting for a high rate of international employees. Questionnaires were distributed among the building occupants with the aim to investigate, among other things, their satisfaction with temperature, air quality, lighting, noise, view to the outside and privacy. With regard to thermal comfort and air quality, the results show that indeed people's rating varied significantly according to their climate of origin as well as with the time span spent in the country. However, no statistically significant differences were found in terms of their satisfaction level with the other above-mentioned comfort factors. Overall, the study provides new insights on the relationship between comfort perception, cultural background and people's adaptive behavior, raising questions about the appropriateness of current comfort models and design strategies to achieve adequate environmental conditions in workplaces

Suitability of neighborhood-scale massing models for daylight performance evaluation.

Access to daylight in buildings is the combined effect of a building’s own physical attributes along with its surrounding physical context. There is thus growing interest among researchers to extend the use of building performance simulation (BPS) tools for daylight performance evaluation, not just for an individual building, but to the neighborhood scale and beyond. In the design process of neighborhoods, massing models are often utilized and are a pivotal early design-stage work-product. These models are typically simple and delineate broad geometric dimensions of built enclosures. They are thus attractive for fast early design stage assessment using BPS tools and maybe used to determine daylight access potential. However, at this stage, the designer may have limited and imprecise information regarding the building façade, the vital element for daylight intake and distribution in the building interior. In this study, we assess the dependability of simple massing models for comparative indoor daylight assessments of neighborhood forms. Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI) metric based performance values were calculated for five neighborhood design options using common practice for façade related inputs in early design stage simulation models and then ranked in decreasing order of performance. A virtual progression of the design-process was then carried out to develop multiple plausible façade design solutions for all proposed massing schemes. The main finding of this study is that significant changes can be observed in neighbourhood rankings when increasing the degree of detail in the façade design solutions. While the highest performing designs were found to maintain their ranks, the rankings of other projects shifted considerably when façade related information was supplied. This work informs on the possibility of erroneous design decisions resulting from simplified façade inputs in early design stage models and fosters the growing discussion on appropriate utilization of BPS tools for informing design decisions

Urban planning and solar potential: Assessing users' interaction with a novel decision-support workflow for early-stage design

The need for sustainable architecture and urban design and planning has long been acknowledged, along with the necessity for adequate, early-phase guiding instruments. This paper aims at exploring the effectiveness and usability of a novel decision-support workflow for neighbourhood-scale projects, developed to provide practitioners with early-stage design alternatives in an interactive and iterative sequence. The prototype includes a performance assessment engine, which quickly computes an estimate of the daylight and passive and active solar potential for each design alternative. To assess the added value for design and the educational features offered by the workflow, workshops were organized with architects and urban planners. Participants were asked to work on a realistic micro-urban design project by means of two different approaches: making use of their conventional tools and methods, and then using the prototype. In addition to these design phases, the workshop included ranking design alternatives with respect to their performance before and after using the prototype, and filling pre- and post-workshop questionnaires to gather the participants’ level of experience and their feedback. The main outcomes from these tasks show that the prototype yields a strong potential in terms of design guidance, despite mixed results in the level of success in the before and after ranking phases. Results also highlight the necessity to pursue the development and adoption of energy-oriented early-stage design instruments

Acasos e escolhas: uma trajetória nada ortodoxa na antropologia: entrevista com Armelle Giglio-Jacquemot

Acasos e escolhas: uma trajetória nada ortodoxa na antropologia: entrevista com Armelle Giglio-Jacquemo

Examining Building Design Decisions Under Long Term Weather Variability and Microclimatic Effects: A case-based exploratory study

Thermal building simulation currently uses Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data to guide the design decision-making process or for compliance with energy standards. TMY data usually excludes extremes and in many cases are gathered from microclimatic contexts that are not sufficiently representative of the project sites (e.g., airports), adding uncertainty in the analyses. To enable a quantification of uncertainty due to weather by exploring a wide variety of atypical weather conditions, the authors have previously proposed synthetic weather data for building simulation. This is a suite of weather time series, generated from typical weather data that includes heat waves and atypical peak temperatures. In this paper, we used this synthetic weather to examine the effect of considering atypical conditions on design decisions. We also compared the impact of including ‘city-modified’ weather data on retrofit decisions using urban microclimate simulation. We found that it may not be viable to pre-select a subset of weather data for all buildings at a given location. Rather, multiple weather data sets may be simulated based on the design strategies and performance criteria of importance. In other words, an extreme condition/year for one building isn’t necessarily the same for another. For example, in the case study presented, heat island effect was found to be a likely hindrance to night time cooling. This paper informs the debate on the necessity of expanding the current energy building analyses to a broader consideration of weather variability and more realistic urban microclimate characterization

Assessing the impact of contemporary urbanization on bioclimatic features of historic architecture through a two-step simulation process

The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic understanding, through simulation-based assessment, of how contemporary urban planning affects the bioclimatic features of existing historic architecture. An emblematic early 20th century Brazilian building, the Casa das Rosas in São Paulo, has been chosen as a case study to see how the deep transformation of its surroundings has altered its indoor conditions. Taking into account both the original and the current urban and environmental conditions, a two-step assessment is conducted by moving between two levels of simulation: the urban- and building-scales. The urban-scale simulations characterize the microclimate parameters (temperature, humidity, and wind speed) that will represent the boundary conditions for the building-scale simulation. EnergyPlus and DIVA-for-Rhino were used to assess the bioclimatic features in terms of indoor thermal and visual comfort levels respectively. Despite the revival of passive design solutions derived from historic architecture, studies of the influence of contemporary urban settlements on their comfort behavior are still quite limited. Outcomes from our simulations show that urban planning can have a significant impact on the indoor light levels of historic buildings, but that the average temperature conditions are not significantly affected. We expect that the results would show a bigger difference if anthropogenic heat sources were taken into account, especially for outdoor comfort conditions

Multiple Masses on the Tongue of a Patient with Generalized Mucocutaneous Lesions

Luca Pastore and colleagues discuss the differential diagnosis and management of a 62-year-old man who presented with a 6-cm fungating mass on the dorsum of the tongue