Model-based Design of a Solar Driven Hybrid System for Space Heating and DHW Preparation of a Multifamily House☆

Abstract Following the most recent European Directives on Energy Performance of Buildings and Energy Efficiency, new solutions for DHW production, space heating and cooling have to be developed and applied to reduce the primary energy consumption of residential buildings. Due to the complexity of installation and control, H&C hybrid systems exploiting a mix of conventional fuels and RES are not yet widespread although they can bring important savings to the yearly building energy consumptions. This work summarizes the parametric analysis used as part of the design process of a hybrid system for the retrofit of a multifamily house located in Madrid, and shows how heating, cooling and DHW demands of multifamily houses can be covered by a heat pump plus solar systems, integrating a high share of RES. The design of the system has taken into account energy savings, economics and architectural aspects

Energy benefit assessment of a Water Loop Heat Pump system integrated with a CO2 commercial refrigeration unit

The improvement of energy efficiency and the use of environmentally friendly working fluids are key elements of current European policies. Supermarkets are intensive energy consumers and approximately the 40% of their annual energy consumption is for refrigeration. Direct emissions of greenhouse gases associated with the use of high Global Warming Potential (GWP) refrigerants, and the indirect impact on the environment related to high electrical energy consumption, make shopping malls not sustainable buildings. This paper analyses the energy saving potential of integrated supermarket air conditioning and refrigeration systems using a Water Loop Heat Pump system (WLHP), where a water loop is used as a heat source/sink for a number of electric reversible heat pumps which provide climate control on the thermal zones. A basic CO2 booster commercial refrigeration system, applied to cold rooms and display cabinets, is considered. Heat recovery from the refrigeration circuit is performed in the heating season, while in the cooling season a dry cooler on the water loop allows heat rejection to outdoors. A comprehensive model of a commercial building, HVAC and refrigeration integrated systems is presented. The building and all systems are modelled in the Trnsys environment taking into account the hourly weather data, the simulated daily profiles of the cooling and heating load demand and the request from refrigerated food storage equipment. Such a model allows a thorough understanding of the potential for energy savings with heat recovery solutions. This work is developed in the framework of CommONEnergy, an EU project funded by the European Community within the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) that aims at reducing energy consumption in shopping malls

Refining patient selection for next-generation immunotherapeutic early-phase clinical trials with a novel and externally validated prognostic nomogram

IntroductionIdentifying which patient may benefit from immunotherapeutic early-phase clinical trials is an unmet need in drug development. Among several proposed prognostic scores, none has been validated in patients receiving immunomodulating agents (IMAs)-based combinations.Patients and methodsWe retrospectively collected data of 208 patients enrolled in early-phase clinical trials investigating IMAs at our Institution, correlating clinical and blood-based variables with overall survival (OS). A retrospective cohort of 50 patients treated with IMAs at Imperial College (Hammersmith Hospital, London, UK) was used for validation.ResultsA total of 173 subjects were selected for analyses. Most frequent cancers included non-small cell lung cancer (26%), hepatocellular carcinoma (21.5%) and glioblastoma (13%). Multivariate analysis (MVA) revealed 3 factors to be independently associated with OS: line of treatment (second and third vs subsequent, HR 0.61, 95% CI 0.40-0.93, p 0.02), serum albumin as continuous variable (HR 0.57, 95% CI 0.36–0.91, p 0.02) and number of metastatic sites (<3 vs ≥3, HR 0.68, 95% CI 0.48-0.98, p 0.04). After splitting albumin value at the median (3.84 g/dL), a score system was capable of stratifying patients in 3 groups with significantly different OS (p<0.0001). Relationship with OS reproduced in the external cohort (p=0.008). Then, from these factors we built a nomogram.ConclusionsPrior treatment, serum albumin and number of metastatic sites are readily available prognostic traits in patients with advanced malignancies participating into immunotherapy early-phase trials. Combination of these factors can optimize patient selection at study enrollment, maximizing therapeutic intent

An automatic analysis framework for FDOPA PET neuroimaging

In this study we evaluate the performance of a fully automated analytical framework for FDOPA PET neuroimaging data, and its sensitivity to demographic and experimental variables and processing parameters. An instance of XNAT imaging platform was used to store the King's College London institutional brain FDOPA PET imaging archive, alongside individual demographics and clinical information. By re-engineering the historical Matlab-based scripts for FDOPA PET analysis, a fully automated analysis pipeline for imaging processing and data quantification was implemented in Python and integrated in XNAT. The final data repository includes 892 FDOPA PET scans organized from 23 different studies. We found good reproducibility of the data analysis by the automated pipeline (in the striatum for the Kicer: for the controls ICC = 0.71, for the psychotic patients ICC = 0.88). From the demographic and experimental variables assessed, gender was found to most influence striatal dopamine synthesis capacity (F = 10.7, p < 0.001), with women showing greater dopamine synthesis capacity than men. Our automated analysis pipeline represents a valid resourse for standardised and robust quantification of dopamine synthesis capacity using FDOPA PET data. Combining information from different neuroimaging studies has allowed us to test it comprehensively and to validate its replicability and reproducibility performances on a large sample size

A framework for the technical evaluation of residential buildings’ energy retrofit

Despite a wide range of energy-efficient technologies, financial products and public incentives are already available, the private as well as the public sector are struggling to invest in energy efficient solutions for buildings. The primary barriers are the high initial cost and the uncertain payback period of the energy refurbishment. Allowing for different scenario testing and considering interactions among different building energy systems, building energy simulation tools can help investors overcoming such barriers by offering support to the technical planning of energy refurbishment kits through quantitative information rather than qualitative. The energy performance and comfort of three reference multifamily residential buildings typologies were evaluated considering three envelope retrofitting performance levels (high-medium-low insulated and airtight) and different heating and domestic hot water systems (heat pump, boiler, district heating). The tested envelope retrofitting performance levels allow for heating need reduction between 50% and 90% compared to the reference case. The active cooling system is not accounted for and building energy simulations outputs include thermal comfort evaluation and overheating risk assessment during the summer season. The potential of photovoltaic system combined with heat pump is evaluated in the three reference cases leading to up to 30% of load coverage

Systemic solution-sets

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Energy savings results

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