Adaptive building and skin: An innovative computational workflow to design energy efficient buildings in different climate zones

This research aims at developing an innovative methodology and the related computational workflow to design energy efficient buildings equipped with climate responsive building skins able to respond dynamically to environmental conditions changing over the time. This methodology, called Adaptive Building and Skin (AB&S), is applicable in different climate zones and consists of a computational form-finding method, which supports architects and engineers in the buildings’ design process resulting in buildings with optimized energy performance and a high level of indoor and outdoor comfort under changing environmental conditions. The innovative-ness of AB&S lies in the fact that it includes the entire design process and considers several internal and external inputs to find the best solutions at all scales of a project: starting from the micro urban-scale with the design of the site and of the building shape, down to the building-scale and finally the skin-scale. Applicability and functionality of AB&S has been tested and improved in the design of office buildings located in specific cities located in different climate zones (cold, temperate, tropical and subtropical). Results of the application in Berlin, Germany, are presented in detail in this paper

Treatment of malting wastewater in a granular sludge sequencing batch reactor (SBR)

Aerobic granular sludge was successfully cultivated in a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) treating wastewater from the malting process with a high content of particulate organic matter. At an organic loading rate of 3.2 kg/(m3 d) CODtotal and an influent particle concentration of 0.95 g/L MLSS an average removal of 50% in CODtotal and 80% in CODdissolved could be achieved. A comparison of granular and flocculent sludge grown under the same operating conditions showed no significant difference in removal efficiency although granules exhibited a higher metabolic activity in terms of specific oxygen uptake rate (rO2, X). Two distinct mechanisms of particle removal were observed for granular sludge: during initial granule formation, particles were incorporated into the biofilm matrix. For mature granules, a high level of protozoa growth on the granule surface accounted for the ability to remove particulate COD. Combined evaluation of the development in MLSS content and sludge bed settling rate (i.e., mean derivative of the normalized sludge volume) was found to be an adequate method for monitoring the characteristic settling properties of a granulizing sludge bed. By means of this method, a distinct substrate gradient out of several operating conditions was concluded to have the biggest impact on the formation of aerobic granular sludge

Drag coefficient of porous and permeable microbial granules

Settling velocity of microbial aggregates, such as anaerobic and aerobic granules, in biological wastewater treatment systems is highly related to their drag coefficient. In this work a new approach, taking the porosity and the permeability into account, was established to evaluate the drag coefficient of porous and permeable microbial granules. The effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated by the experimental results with both the anaerobic and the aerobic granules. The drag coefficient of the microbial granules was found to be less than that of smooth rigid spheres and Biofilm-covered particles. In addition, this study demonstrates that the drag coefficient of microbial granules depended heavily on their permeability and porosity. A fractal-cluster model was found to be able to predict the distribution of the primary particles in the microbial granules