“Plug and play” modular façade construction system for building renovation to achieve nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB)

Following energy performance improvement policies, there is a need for the massive renovation of the European building stock. The prevalence of multi-rise buildings with concrete structure and poor thermal performance offers a significant opportunity for renovation packages that facilitate the improvement of the building fabric, with its insulation, air-tightness and integration of building services and solar technologies. The RenoZEB project develops a "plug and play" modular facade construction system answering to this need. This prefabricated plug and play modular system has been tested by reproducing the holistic methodology and new technologies in the market by means of real and virtual demonstrators. The applicability and effectiveness of the methodology has been tested by means of a full-scale mock-up system has been constructed and installed in the KUBIK by Tecnalia test facility. The design, construction, manufacture & installation cycle has been tested. Its applicability for a real construction project for a multi-rise residential building in Spain is presented.This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 768718

Plug and Play Modular Façade Construction System for Renovation for Residential Buildings

The present paper focuses on the architectural and constructional features required to ensure that building envelope renovation are safe, functional, and adaptable to the building stock, with particular focus on “plug and play” modular facade construction systems. It presents the design of one such system and how it addresses these issues. The outcome of early-stage functional test with a full-scale mock-up system, as well as its applicability to a real construction project is presented. It is found crucial to obtain high quality information about the status of the existing façade with the use of modern technologies such as topographic surveys or 3D scans and point cloud. Detailed design processes are required to ensure the compatibility of manufacture and installation tolerances, along with anchor systems that deliver flexibility for adjustment, and construction processes adapting standard installation methods to the architectural particularities of each case that may hinder its use or require some modification in each situation. This prefabricated plug and play modular system has been tested by reproducing the holistic methodology and new technologies in the market by means of real demonstrators. When compared to more conventional construction methods, this system achieves savings in a real case of 50% (time), 30% (materials) and 25% (waste), thus achieving significant economic savings.This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 768718

Holistické řízení datacenter: Metodika pro uvedení do provozu víceoborového řízení datacenter s použitím simulace budov

The world data center energy consumption has been growing rapidly and currently is estimated at 1,7–2,2% of the world-wide electricity consumption. Achieving sustainability in this sector calls for development new energy efficient strategies and measures. Current research deals with development of holistic operation i.e. operation, where all essential processes such as data processing, cooling and power delivery and supply (including renewable energy sources) are optimized a coordinated. Testing of modern operational strategies, which is necessary for development and commissioning, is not possible during the regular operation due to the risk of limitation of the services or outage of the data center operation. Any outage of the data center is related with financial and reputation losses. Therefore, the testing is extremely limited. Alternatively, building energy simulation may offer “safe” testing environment for advanced control algorithms and accelerate their implementation in practice. This paper describes a novel workflow for testing of modern control algorithm and new application of building energy simulation of data center

Simulační posouzení úpravy vlhkosti v systémech chlazení data center s ekonomizérem na straně vzduchu

The increasing digitalisation of data is resulting in the need for ever greater computational capacity, which in turn leads to the increasing energy consumption in data centres. A large percentage of this energy use arises from the need to mechanically remove an enormous amount of heat from the data centre environment. In fact, in current practice, the mechanical infrastructure (especially cooling systems) of the data centre accounts for up to half of the overall energy consumption. To reduce the energy consumption of the mechanical infrastructure, several economisation methods are commonly implemented in cooling systems, one of which is the application of a direct air-side economiser addressed in the current research. The use of an air-side economiser has been shown to lead to major savings of the cooling electricity demand, and, as such, it has been widely used as a necessary addition to conventional cooling systems. This study analyses the energy breakdown of data centre cooling systems that include an air-side economiser in order to determine which components within the system are responsible for the major energy consumption. This study investigates, via a computational simulation, the impact of the use of a conventional cooling system and a system with an air-side economiser on total energy demand in three locations representing different climate regions in Europe. The study is especially focused on the energy demand related to the humidity treatment in the data rooms, since the effect is rarely considered in the overall DC energy balance. The results demonstrate, as expected, that the air-side economiser can yield major savings of around 62.5% to 78.7%, depending on the given climate regions. However, the key result of this study is that the humidity treatment necessary for the direct air-side economiser system may consume up to 34.8% of the total energy demand of the cooling system with the air-side economiser. © 2018, Society of Environmental Engineering

“Plug and play” modular façade construction system for building renovation to achieve nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB)

Following energy performance improvement policies, there is a need for the massive renovation of the European building stock. The prevalence of multi-rise buildings with concrete structure and poor thermal performance offers a significant opportunity for renovation packages that facilitate the improvement of the building fabric, with its insulation, air-tightness and integration of building services and solar technologies. The RenoZEB project develops a "plug and play" modular facade construction system answering to this need. This prefabricated plug and play modular system has been tested by reproducing the holistic methodology and new technologies in the market by means of real and virtual demonstrators. The applicability and effectiveness of the methodology has been tested by means of a full-scale mock-up system has been constructed and installed in the KUBIK by Tecnalia test facility. The design, construction, manufacture & installation cycle has been tested. Its applicability for a real construction project for a multi-rise residential building in Spain is presented