Integrating energy efficiency into building design using a simplified thermal assessment method

New buildings and building refurbishments should be designed such that the best use is made of solar energy, and that fossil fuel based energy is not wasted. Because the thermal processes in a building are quite complex, the use of thermal assessment methods such as dynamic thermal simulation are generally recommended as part of the design process. These methods are intended to show building designers the effects of their building proposals on energy use, but are often too slow and difficult to use and do not really ?fit? into typical design practice. Therefore the job of energy assessment might be given to an engineer, but usually no assessment is done at all, or else the engineer is employed only to ?rubber stamp? the completed design. The method outlined in this paper is intended to give the building designer access to all the information in such a way that at early design stages the thermal characteristics of the building design can be quickly explored, in a parallel way to which designers explore issues of function and use, aesthetics, structure and cost. It is proposed that through use of such a method, considerations of energy and environment can be integrated into each project from the very start of the design process

Exploring the Whole Life Carbon Benefits of Insulation Materials in Housing Refurbishment

Embodied carbon can be an important part of a building's whole life carbon cost and as such offers potential possibilities to reduce carbon emissions. To date the majority of research in this area has focused on new buildings and overlooked the existing housing stock much of which is in urgent need of upgrading if emissions reduction targets set out by the Government are to be achieved. This paper briefly explores the whole life benefits of including embodied carbon in the specification of insulation materials in UK retrofits. Insulation has the potential to both reduce in-use CO2 emissions of a building as well as lead to further emissions during its manufacture and transport, and in the case of bio-insulations to even sequester CO2. Dynamic thermal simulation was used to predict CO2 savings over 25 to 50 year periods resulting from heating reductions of retrofitting, and the embodied carbon values of the materials used was calculated using two freely available databases. Three insulation materials were used for comparison; Polyurethane foam, Mineral wool and Wood fibre. The results suggest that the reduction of embodied carbon in retrofitting has the potential to reduce a buildings whole life carbon, with the extent of this reduction dependent on whether sequestered carbon is included in the figures for bio based insulation. Although the accepted orthodoxy recommends the use of the most efficient insulation available, this study shows that the inclusion of embodied carbon values into the equation brings this approach into question

Thermal simulation outputs: exploring the concept of patterns in design decision-making

This paper describes the ongoing development of a building performance simulation (BPS) knowledge management scheme for design decision-making. This knowledge management scheme is developed with reference to the patterns of Christopher Alexander and colleagues, which describe commonly recurring abstract problems in architectural design together with successful abstract solutions. As such they form a ‘repository of knowledge’ on architectural design. Patterns have been used in other fields such as software engineering where they also aim at capturing expert knowledge, and their potential to do the same for BPS is explored here. Decision support using simulation is introduced and the concept of patterns described. A pattern structure is developed and some examples given. Interviews with architectural practices investigated whether patterns could support design processes, and the further development of the concept is discussed

Placing user needs at the centre of building performance simulation tool development: Using ‘designer personas’ to assess existing BPS tools

This paper explores the development of ‘building designer personas’ to illustrate how Building Performance Simulation (BPS) can engage with Human Computer Interaction (HCI) knowledge and methods to place its users at the centre of development of new tools. It explains this concept and sets up the fundamentals to develop it further based on previous work on meaningful information for design decision making (Bleil de Souza and Tucker 2014 and 2015). An example of a building designer ‘provisional persona’ in a specific scenario is developed in detail. This example is then used to assess how current BPS tools satisfy this user’s needs and to identify what is missing from BPS development through not carefully considering those needs. This concept can be applied to different types of BPS users and this paper briefly mentions how to explore it in future work

Thermal simulation software outputs: patterns for decision making

This paper describes a structure that enables simulation software developers and building designers to produce thermal simulation results meaningful to design decision making. The structure is based on the development of 'patterns' in which analysis processes are applied to thermal simulation outputs to produce relevant information to inform design actions and decisions. A discussion is made on how the patterns can be developed and examples illustrate the suggested development process and generation of simulation outputs. The patterns are intended to bridge the gap between the needs of the designer for useful design oriented software, and the needs of the software developer for technical information on exactly what is required by the user

Thermal simulation software outputs: what do building designers propose?

This paper describes the process used to develop a framework to produce thermal simulation post- processed information and data representation systems meaningful to design decision making. The framework comes from reverse engineering an empirical data set in which designers were invited to propose meaningful building thermal physics information to design decision making when requested to solve a design problem specifically tailored for this purpose. A combination of: Interaction Design. Information Visualization and Qualitative research methods from Social Science were used to undertake the analysis. Tins enabled theoretical aspects involved in how building designers solve design problems also to be taken into consideratio

Placing User Needs at the Centre of Building Performance Simulation: Transferring Knowledge from Human Computer Interaction

This paper reviews and explores some principles and theories of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the related field of Interaction Design in relation to Building Performance Simulation (BPS). HCI seeks to make computer systems and software more useable and more attractive to its users. The main focus of the paper is on the interaction between user and computer system and how interaction could facilitate the knowledge transfer of BPS procedures and processes from experts to non-experts. The paper discusses users and their tasks, designing for interaction, and the level of control different users might have over BPS. Design patterns are proposed as a means of interaction between user and computer system. The aim of the paper is to provide a platform for a future discussion on the extent to which BPS has engaged with HCI practices and principles, and the possibilities HCI holds for the further development of BPS. A number of research directions are identified

Preliminary Evidence for the Cross-Cultural Utility of the Type D Personality Construct in the Ukraine

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The identification of informative genes from multiple datasets with increasing complexity

Background In microarray data analysis, factors such as data quality, biological variation, and the increasingly multi-layered nature of more complex biological systems complicates the modelling of regulatory networks that can represent and capture the interactions among genes. We believe that the use of multiple datasets derived from related biological systems leads to more robust models. Therefore, we developed a novel framework for modelling regulatory networks that involves training and evaluation on independent datasets. Our approach includes the following steps: (1) ordering the datasets based on their level of noise and informativeness; (2) selection of a Bayesian classifier with an appropriate level of complexity by evaluation of predictive performance on independent data sets; (3) comparing the different gene selections and the influence of increasing the model complexity; (4) functional analysis of the informative genes. Results In this paper, we identify the most appropriate model complexity using cross-validation and independent test set validation for predicting gene expression in three published datasets related to myogenesis and muscle differentiation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that models trained on simpler datasets can be used to identify interactions among genes and select the most informative. We also show that these models can explain the myogenesis-related genes (genes of interest) significantly better than others (P < 0.004) since the improvement in their rankings is much more pronounced. Finally, after further evaluating our results on synthetic datasets, we show that our approach outperforms a concordance method by Lai et al. in identifying informative genes from multiple datasets with increasing complexity whilst additionally modelling the interaction between genes. Conclusions We show that Bayesian networks derived from simpler controlled systems have better performance than those trained on datasets from more complex biological systems. Further, we present that highly predictive and consistent genes, from the pool of differentially expressed genes, across independent datasets are more likely to be fundamentally involved in the biological process under study. We conclude that networks trained on simpler controlled systems, such as in vitro experiments, can be used to model and capture interactions among genes in more complex datasets, such as in vivo experiments, where these interactions would otherwise be concealed by a multitude of other ongoing events

A Pan-African Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Simulation with the Met Office Unified Model: CP4-Africa

This is the final version. Available on open access from the American Meteorological Society via the DOI in this recordA convection-permitting multiyear regional climate simulation using the Met Office Unified Model has been run for the first time on an Africa-wide domain. The model has been run as part of the Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) Improving Model Processes for African Climate (IMPALA) project, and its configuration, domain, and forcing data are described here in detail. The model [Pan-African Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Simulation with the Met Office UM (CP4-Africa)] uses a 4.5-km horizontal grid spacing at the equator and is run without a convection parameterization, nested within a global atmospheric model driven by observations at the sea surface, which does include a convection scheme. An additional regional simulation, with identical resolution and physical parameterizations to the global model, but with the domain, land surface, and aerosol climatologies of CP4-Africa, has been run to aid in the understanding of the differences between the CP4-Africa and global model, in particular to isolate the impact of the convection parameterization and resolution. The effect of enforcing moisture conservation in CP4-Africa is described and its impact on reducing extreme precipitation values is assessed. Preliminary results from the first five years of the CP4-Africa simulation show substantial improvements in JJA average rainfall compared to the parameterized convection models, with most notably a reduction in the persistent dry bias in West Africa, giving an indication of the benefits to be gained from running a convection-permitting simulation over the whole African continent.Natural Environment Research Council (NERC