Modeling global and regional potentials for building-integrated solar energy generation

With the Paris Agreement coming into force, global efforts will need to maximize opportunities through energy efficiency and renewable energy generation. Zero energy/carbon initiatives are mushrooming worldwide, but it has not been fully understood which building types in which climates and under which conditions can potentially be built to net zero energy standards. In order to inform these efforts, a new model was developed to estimate the technical potential for building¿integrated solar energy (BISE, the name of the model) generation in a high resolution regional, climate and building typology breakdown., The BISE model also evaluates the opportunities for potential net zero energy buildings based on the BISE findigns, combining these with the findings of two global low-energy building models. The BISE model has a very high resolution in terms of geographic regions, climate types, building types and vin- tages. Moreover, the model combines methods for bottom-up energy modeling and geospatial analysis. The thermal building energy demand estimation is based on the 3CSEP-HEB model and the plug load scenarios are based on the BUENAS model. Results are wide, due to intrinsic limitationso of the model detailed in the paper, but it is shown that there is a substantial potential for building-integrated solar energy generation in all world regions, and that the Deep Efficiency Scenario allows significantly more building types to meet net zero energy levels by 2050 in contrast to a scenario when only moderate energy efficiency improvements are implemented.The work presented in this paper was funded by Central European University as part of a PhD research and through other grants. Special gratitude is expressed Dr. M. McNeil for sharing the data and their expertise on building energy use and energy modelling. The authors would like to thank Mr. D. Leiszen for his creative approach to developing software and visulisation parts of the model

Heating and cooling energy trends and drivers in buildings

The purpose of this paper is to provide a source of information on thermal energy use in buildings, its drivers, and their past, present and future trends on a global and regional basis. Energy use in buildings forms a large part of global and regional energy demand. The importance of heating and cooling in total building energy use is very diverse with this share varying between 18% and 73%. Biomass is still far the dominant fuel when a global picture is considered; the role of electricity is substantially growing, and the direct use of coal is disappearing from this sector, largely replaced by electricity and natural gas in the most developed regions. This paper identifies the different drivers of heating and cooling energy demand, and decomposes this energy demand into key drivers based on a Kaya identity approach: number of households, persons per household, floor space per capita and specific energy consumption for residential heating and cooling; and GDP, floor space per GDP, and specific energy consumption for commercial buildings. This paper also reviews the trends in the development of these drivers for the present, future – and for which data were available, for the past – in 11 world regions as well as globally. Results show that in a business-as-usual scenario, total residential heating and cooling energy use is expected to more or less stagnate, or slightly decrease, in the developed parts of the world. In contrast, commercial heating and cooling energy use will grow in each world region. Finally, the results show that per capita total final residential building energy use has been stagnating in the vast majority of world regions for the past three decades, despite the very significant increases in energy service levels in each of these regions.The work is partially funded by the Spanish Government (ENE2011–28269-C03-02 and ENE2011-13511-E). The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group GREA (2014 SGR 123) and research group DIOPMA (2014 SGR 1543

Electric Discharge Plasmochemical Synthesis of Carbon Nanomaterials

High-energy electric discharge technologies (electric breakdown and HF volume discharge in organic media) for a large scale synthesis of amorphous carbon (AC) are developed. A destruction of hydrocarbon molecules into separate fragments occurs during such processing of organic media, what results in AC formation in the process of ultra-fast cooling of the clusters. To investigate the influence of chemical nature of working media, organic liquids and gases from the class of arenes with sp2-hybridisation of carbon atoms in molecule and alkanes with sp3-hybridisation were used. Performed XRD, HRTEM and Raman studies showed that produced powders are typical amorphous materials with significant degree of disorder. But only in the case of electric breakdown of alkanes, carbon nanomaterials with complex core-shell structure were discovered. Individual particles of onion-like carbon (OLC) consist of ~ 5 nm core surrounded by graphitic shell of 5-6 layers. Synthesized OLC is used as antifriction additives to industrial oils and as material for electromagnetic waves shielding. The statistical analysis of the atomic structure of the synthesized materials using reverse Monte Carlo and Voronoi-Delaunay methods was performed. When you are citing the document, use the following link http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/3509