The Role of Natural Ventilative Cooling in NZE Temporary and Emergency Shelters Design: a Mediterranean Case Study

The paper presents a case-study of a pre-fabricated housing module built in Messina (Sicily, Italy) and the assessment of its energy performances under the net zero energy perspective. The potential of ventilative natural cooling application in the case-study is also investigated. Some particular features of the building - the modularity, the prefabrication, the rapidity of assembly, the possibility of being built on disconnected soils and the absence of maintenance - identify an effective use as a temporary housing solution for e.g. workers in proximity of an isolated working place or in emergency situations such as earthquakes and natural disasters. Monitoring studies were performed during some weeks in summer, the building was simulated in energy plus environment, validated obtaining small and acceptable differences between monitored and simulated data. Results identify the building as a plus zero energy building, with generation nearly doubling the overall electricity consumption. Natural ventilation in the hot Sicilian climate would prove efficient to reduce electricity consumption for cooling by 20% in a year mainly during mid-seasons but the design needs to be improved by including a more bioclimatic-oriented approach

Experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamic study of an active ventilated façade integrating battery and distributed MPPT

Ventilated Façades integrating photovoltaic panels are a promising way to improve efficiency and the thermal-physical performances of buildings. Due the inherent intermittence of the non-programmable renewable energy sources, their increasing usage implies the use of energy storage systems to mitigate the mismatch between power generation and the buildings’ load demand. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the thermo-fluid dynamic performances of a prototype integrating a photovoltaic cell and a battery as a module of an active ventilated façade. Based on an experimental setup, a numerical study in steady state conditions of flow through the air cavity of the module has been carried out and implemented in a fluid-dynamics Finite Volume code. In order to assess the viability of the prototype, the calibrated model was lastly used to predict thermal performance of the prototype on different climate conditions supporting its further improvement

The risk stratification of adverse neonatal outcomes in women with gestational diabetes (STRONG) study

Aims: To assess the risk of adverse neonatal outcomes in women with gestational diabetes (GDM) by identifying subgroups of women at higher risk to recognize the characteristics most associated with an excess of risk. Methods: Observational, retrospective, multicenter study involving consecutive women with GDM. To identify distinct and homogeneous subgroups of women at a higher risk, the RECursive Partitioning and AMalgamation (RECPAM) method was used. Overall, 2736 pregnancies complicated by GDM were analyzed. The main outcome measure was the occurrence of adverse neonatal outcomes in pregnancies complicated by GDM. Results: Among study participants (median age 36.8 years, pre-gestational BMI 24.8 kg/m2), six miscarriages, one neonatal death, but no maternal death was recorded. The occurrence of the cumulative adverse outcome (OR 2.48, 95% CI 1.59–3.87), large for gestational age (OR 3.99, 95% CI 2.40–6.63), fetal malformation (OR 2.66, 95% CI 1.00–7.18), and respiratory distress (OR 4.33, 95% CI 1.33–14.12) was associated with previous macrosomia. Large for gestational age was also associated with obesity (OR 1.46, 95% CI 1.00–2.15). Small for gestational age was associated with first trimester glucose levels (OR 1.96, 95% CI 1.04–3.69). Neonatal hypoglycemia was associated with overweight (OR 1.52, 95% CI 1.02–2.27) and obesity (OR 1.62, 95% CI 1.04–2.51). The RECPAM analysis identified high-risk subgroups mainly characterized by high pre-pregnancy BMI (OR 1.68, 95% CI 1.21–2.33 for obese; OR 1.38 95% CI 1.03–1.87 for overweight). Conclusions: A deep investigation on the factors associated with adverse neonatal outcomes requires a risk stratification. In particular, great attention must be paid to the prevention and treatment of obesity

Integration of Building Simulation and Life Cycle Assessment: A TRNSYS Application

The study proposes a tool developed within the TRNSYS environment aimed at integrating its building simulation features during the use phase with a Life Cycle Assessment approach. The tool can be used to investigate the relevance of each life-cycle step of the building on the primary energy consumption and global warming potential. The Life Cycle stages can be modelled with different approaches: direct input of the embodied energy and global warming potential values for each life cycle step as defined in the EN 15978, use of an internal database of embodied energy and global warming potential of construction materials and energy systems, direct connections of building simulation outputs to the tool for the use phase. The proposed component is able to model correctly the LCA of a case study, obtaining negligible deviations from the results of a LCA study performed with a state of the art LCA software (lower than 0.05% for all impacts)

Ventilative cooling application in Mediterranean buildings: impacts on grid interaction and load match

The concept of load matching refers to the simultaneous occurrence of loads and generation in buildings: it can be increased and optimised with modifications on both the energy demand and generation, but its pre-requisite is to guarantee passive energy efficiency. In the Mediterranean areas, a major challenge in new buildings is the increasing overheating even during mildly hot seasons. Ventilative cooling can be a potential solution to such issues and have an impact on load match in buildings and their grid interaction. The study analyses the potential of ventilative cooling to improve the load match in three different case studies in Italy. Ventilative cooling proved viable in moderately improving the load match and in more effectively reducing import of electricity from the grid under the appropriate climaticindoor conditions. In addition, the thermal-physical features, energy generation and consumption characteristics of the buildings are a source of large variability in the results. Increases in the load cover factor through natural ventilative cooling among the case studies range from 0.5% (high-performance building, low cooling share) to 5% (prefabricated module, high cooling share on the total); energy import is reduced effectively from 1% up to 22% in the case of a Sicilian residential building

An integrated building energy simulation early—Design tool for future heating and cooling demand assessment

Climate change and its effects are becoming clear on a global scale either from the perspective of global warming and the increase in the rate of occurrence of weather events of extreme magnitude. This has impacts also for sure on the standard building performance analysis approach, since the buildings designed today are supposed to withstand for the following decades climate impacts that may be different than those they were designed for. The paper proposes a simple, easy to use and freely available building simulation utility which performs morphing of existing weather data files and, by connecting to the Energy Plus simulation routine, allows to perform future climate building simulation analyses. Users are required to select one of the ASHRAE buildings models or provide one of their own choosing and to input the original weather data file. The tool will generate a future weather data file with the preferred assumptions (e.g. RCP scenarios, time frame) and elaborate results in terms of heating and cooling required for air conditioning. The paper proposes also an implementation of the tool to a case study aimed at showing the potential of the application proposed. A typical office building model from the ASHRAE library was simulated in two different locations under different climate change assumptions up to the year 2090. The analysis of the results in the two locations of Palermo (Italy) and Copenhagen (Denmark) highlight relevant increases in the current century of up to +20% of cooling requirements and similar reductions for heating in both case studies, if compared to current levels. The research targets a specific limit in the investigation of climate resilience of buildings and follows the principles described by SDSN in the definition of SDGs and the interest at the EU level towards climate neutral and innovative cities. In this context, the paper may contribute to the limited availability of easy to use and free tools available for practitioners to investigate the design of climate resilience buildings