MONITORAGGIO DELLA QUALITÁ AMBIENTALE: POTENZIALITÁ PER L’E-HEALTH E IL MANAGEMENT DELLE SMART CITY

Urban areas significantly contribute to the on-going climate change and, at the same time, are highly vulnerable to its effects, which have a strong impact on citizens’ life quality and health status. The high heterogeneity of cities requires a spatially detailed description of their environmental boundaries, in order to design and implement effective actions aimed at leading towards more healthy and sustainable places. Advances in sensor technology, data communication and processing capabilities allow to conceive the active participation of citizens in the process of environmental data collection within cities, by implementing a human-centered approach with citizens as data prosumers: (both producers consumers of data processed). Retrieved information would thus become enough accurate in space to support an effective renovation of the city and would represent the real exposure of everyone to the consequences of climate change. Wearable devices are already implemented for the smart management of the healthcare sector, and their usage could be thus extended in the coming future for a better management of Smart Cities’ other sector

Field occupants’ behavior monitoring integrated to prediction models: impact on building energy performance

Given the massive scientific progress on passive and active solutions to reach near-zeroenergy targets, the necessity to consider occupants’ behavior as a key variable affecting field energy performance of buildings has become a crucial issue to face. In this panorama, a variety of deterministic and stochastic models, also supported by experimental investigations have been developed in the last decade. This paper builds upon previous contributions to analyze the real occupancy of an office building populated by peers’ offices monitored for 2 years by means of microclimate and energy-need field stations. After demonstrating that the peers do not behave the same and do not control in equivalent ways indoors microclimate parameters (e.g. air temperature, desk illuminance, etc.), internationally acknowledged models and field-collected data are compared through dynamic simulation. The estimation of final energy need of different considered scenarios is calculated and the relative difference is highlighted as a possible indicator about the role of building occupancy profiles in affecting energy need prediction. Additionally, EEG experimental test are used to assess the correlation of workers’ subjective emotions with external thermal stimuli. Results of final energy need estimation showed to vary by about 20% by only selecting the occupancy simulation scheme, and non-consistent prediction trends are found out while investigating lighting and electric appliances needs. Accordingly, as concerns the human psychological response to the variation of thermal conditions, negligible emotional reactions are found among the different tested workers when suddenly altering comfort conditions indoors

New microclimate monitoring method and data process for investigating environmental conditions in complex urban contexts

The rapid urbanization of the last century coupled with local climate change imputable to anthropogenic actions triggered a huge research effort aimed at investigating urban microclimate. Typically, cities present a variety of microclimates due to the internal variation of their landscapes in terms of morphology, surfaces properties, presence of greenery, etc. Location-specific microclimate conditions affect both (i) building energy needs and (ii) citizens’ quality of life. For these reasons, a small-scale analysis from the citizen perspective with high-time-resolution environmental data is required. Recent studies tried to reach that level of precision by using remote sensing, movable observational transects or dense network of weather stations located in specific points of the urban settlement. Within this framework, the current study presents a new bottom-up methodology which aims at identifying granular microclimates within the same built environment. The method consists of a cluster analysis of experimental data collected by a wearable miniaturized weather station which allows the monitoring of outdoor parameters at the pedestrian height and with high-time resolution. Experimental campaigns were conducted in five different case studies, where a planned monitoring path was repeated at different times during the day. The heterogeneity of the context demonstrates the replicability of the proposed method, suitable for clustering different areas of a same urban context characterized by variable local microclimate. The study contributes to better understand the variability of building boundary conditions for energy need prediction and indoor/outdoor environmental comfort assessment

How subjective and non-physical parameters affect occupants’ environmental comfort perception

Employees’ wellbeing and comfort perception demonstrated to largely influence their productivity and tolerability of slight thermal discomfort conditions in the working spaces. Their whole comfort perception indeed depends on several parameters related to physical boundary conditions but also to the adaptation capability of occupants themselves and other personal, difficult to measure, variables. According to the available standards and regulations, only physical and measurable environmental parameters must be considered to evaluate occupants’ comfort conditions. Therefore, non-measurable factors such as socio-psychological, physiological, medical ones are currently not systematically considered. The present work aims to identify possible benefits in terms of occupants’ comfort perception due to non-physical strategies aimed at improving the work-environment quality and livability. To this aim, the environmental multi-physics and multi-domain performance of a mixed industry-office building is investigated through coupled in-field microclimate monitoring and questionnaires campaigns. The experimental microclimate monitoring and survey campaign were carried out to understand (i) the realistic indoor environmental conditions in terms of physical and measurable parameters and (ii) the personal perceptions and attitudes of the occupants with respect to those same ambient parameters, including also acoustic, lighting and medical investigation. Moreover, the collected experimental data were used to determine occupants’ comfort level through the classic comfort models, to be compared to the identified role of non-physical parameters on occupants’ final perception about the indoor environment. The main results show that non-measurable factors induced by virtuous company policy to improve employees’ working environment are effectively able to positively influence their whole-comfort perception even if the majority of workers do not have the opportunity to control their working environment. In fact, the consolidated comfort theories underestimate people satisfaction, as demonstrated by more than the 80% employees, who declared to be positively influenced by the pleasant aesthetics and livability of the workplace. The year-round experimental campaign demonstrated the need to further investigate the key role of non-physical parameters for possible incorporation into whole-comfort prediction models and standards. The role of such strategies could therefore be realistically considered as energy saving opportunities since they make building occupants much more open to tolerate slight uncomfortable conditions

Inter-building assessment of urban heat island mitigation strategies: Field tests and numerical modelling in a simplified-geometry experimental set-up

Large scale mitigation strategies showed to represent promising solutions for enhancing liveability in dense urban contexts. Therefore, most of the researches are focused on assessing the effect of high albedo surfaces and greenery. The paper deals with a numerical and experimental analysis of these evapotranspiration and high-reflectance surfaces in a full scale experimental set-up where more than 20 cubicles are monitored in a Mediterranean continental climate. The experimental set-up itself covers an intermediate inter-building perspective between the lab scale and the real urban contexts, which compromises the possibility to generalize final results. This scale is able to better control geometry of area, but allows real microclimate monitoring and calibration of CFD models. Starting from a validated model, this study simulated alternative scenarios with gradually varying the presence of common mitigation strategies with the scope to evaluate their effect to this aim. Results showed that high albedo solutions best mitigate summer overheating reducing the air temperature, while greenery was more effective in the densest configurations with low albedo envelopes, showing how geometry related variables may play a key role in determining the optima configurations of microclimate mitigation strategies, also important for the best exploitation of renewables in the built environment.The work is partially funded by the Spanish government (ENE2015-64117-C5-1-R (MINECO/FEDER) and ULLE10-4E-1305) and SOS CITTA’ (Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia, (2018.0499.026). The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group (2017 SGR 1537) and the city hall of Puigverd de Lleida. GREiA is a certified agent TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia. Marta Chàfer would like to thank the program Spanish Universities for EU Projects from Campus Iberus for the mobility scholarship. Ilaria Pigliautile would like to acknowledge the PhD Course of Energy and Sustainable development at University of Perugia and H2CU centre for supporting her international activities and scientific collaborations during the course of her PhD. The authors from University of Perugia also thank UNESCO Chair on “Water Resources Management and Culture”, and the Honors Centre of Italian Universities (H2CU) for supporting their studies on wellbeing

Bio-inspired outdoor systems for enhancing citizens thermal comfort in public spaces by learning from nature

In the last decades a variety of high-energy efficient solutions for building envelopes were developed and tested for enhancing indoor thermal comfort and improving indoor environmental quality of private spaces by learning from nature. To this aim, adaptive solutions, conceived thanks to green and bio inspiration, were designed and constructed in various climate conditions and for a variety of building uses. Given the huge population flow toward urban areas, well-being conditions in the public spaces of such dense built environment are being compromised, also due to anthropogenic actions responsible for massive environmental pollution, local overheating, urban heat island, etc. Moreover, this process is exacerbated by temporary phenomena such as heat waves. Therefore, outdoor spaces are becoming increasingly less comfortable and even dangerous for citizens, especially if they are affected by general energy poverty, with no chance for active systems management for air conditioning, or health vulnerability. In this view, this study concerns the first concept for the development of a simple and adaptive nature-inspired solution for outdoor thermal comfort enhancement and local overheating mitigation for pedestrians. The system will be evaluated in terms of the cradle-to-cradle approach and the initial performance assessment is carried out via thermal-energy dynamic simulation. The final purpose will be to design outdoor “alive” shading system to be applied in open public spaces, with evident physical and social benefits

A Global Building Occupant Behavior Database

This paper introduces a database of 34 field-measured building occupant behavior datasets collected from 15 countries and 39 institutions across 10 climatic zones covering various building types in both commercial and residential sectors. This is a comprehensive global database about building occupant behavior. The database includes occupancy patterns (i.e., presence and people count) and occupant behaviors (i.e., interactions with devices, equipment, and technical systems in buildings). Brick schema models were developed to represent sensor and room metadata information. The database is publicly available, and a website was created for the public to access, query, and download specific datasets or the whole database interactively. The database can help to advance the knowledge and understanding of realistic occupancy patterns and human-building interactions with building systems (e.g., light switching, set-point changes on thermostats, fans on/off, etc.) and envelopes (e.g., window opening/closing). With these more realistic inputs of occupants’ schedules and their interactions with buildings and systems, building designers, energy modelers, and consultants can improve the accuracy of building energy simulation and building load forecasting

Transformative Service Research and impact of indoor environmental quality on workers’ productivity: Potentialities of neuroscience in its assessment

Previous research demonstrated that there is a link between workers’ productivity and their overall comfort in the workspaces. Nowadays, the energy crisis is highlighting the need for energy saving measures also in workplaces to reduce expenses, thus posing threats to the overall comfort of workers: how to deal with this trade-off? In such a frame, this paper is a traditional literature review of the research, conducted so far, useful to understand the optimal point of energy needed to secure human wellbeing in workspaces (and thus, acceptable productivity). Moving from an overview of the most common adopted methodologies and related findings, this work focuses on applications and opportunities associated with merging methods from neuroscience. Neuroeconomics, in fact, uses some indexes (cognitive interests, mental fatigue) and techniques (EEG, heart rate) that allow to understand whether a person is focused on his/her work or not: this can represent a double-check of the optimal level of environmental comfort in offices. Environmental comfort studies concerning the adoption of physiological monitoring are compared here to business management studies lying on physiological indexes to assess employees’ interest and cognitive effort, which influence their productivity. This comparison showed up new perspectives in the investigation of occupants’ productivity and environmental comfort, which can be pursued in the coming years to understand how to achieve the optimum between energy consumption and workers’ productivity