Investigating the optimization potential of daylight, energy and occupant satisfaction performance in classrooms using innovative photovoltaic integrated light shelf systems

Author(s):  
Parnian Bakmohammadi ◽  
Esmatullah Noorzai
Author(s):  
Jindong Wu ◽  
Jiantao Weng ◽  
Bing Xia ◽  
Yujie Zhao ◽  
Qiuji Song

High indoor air quality is crucial for the health of human beings. The purpose of this work is to analyze the synergistic effect of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration on occupant satisfaction and work productivity. This study carried out a real-scale experiments in a meeting room with exposures of up to one hour. Indoor environment parameters, including air temperature, relative humidity, illuminance, and noise level, were controlled at a reasonable level. Twenty-nine young participants were participated in the experiments. Four mental tasks were conducted to quantitatively evaluate the work productivity of occupants and a questionnaire was used to access participants’ satisfaction. The Spearman correlation analysis and two-way analysis of variance were applied. It was found that the overall performance declined by 1% for every 10 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 concentration. Moreover, for every 10% increase in dissatisfaction with air quality, productivity performance decreased by 1.1% or more. It should be noted that a high CO2 concentration (800 ppm) has a stronger negative effect on occupant satisfaction towards air quality than PM2.5 concentration in a non-ventilated room. In order to obtain optimal occupant satisfaction and work productivity, low concentrations of PM2.5 (<50 μg/m3) and CO2 (<700 ppm) are recommended.


Buildings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 232
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Medina ◽  
Carolina M. Rodriguez ◽  
Maria Camila Coronado ◽  
Lina Maria Garcia

The analysis of thermal comfort in buildings, energy consumption, and occupant satisfaction is crucial to influencing the architectural design methodologies of the future. However, research in these fields in developing countries is sectorised. Most times, the standards to study and assess thermal comfort such as ASHRAE Standard 55, EN 15251, and ISO 7730 are insufficient and not appropriate for the geographical areas of application. This article presents a scoping review of published work in Colombia, as a representative case study, to highlight the state-of-the-art, research trends, gaps, and potential areas for further development. It examines the amount, origin, extent, and content of research and peer-reviewed documentation over the last decades. The findings allow new insights regarding the preferred models and the evaluation tools that have been used to date and that are recommended to use in the future. It also includes additional information regarding the most and least studied regions, cities, and climates in the country. This work could be of interest for the academic community and policymakers in the areas related to indoor and urban climate management and energy efficiency.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2890 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Khoshbakht ◽  
Zhonghua Gou ◽  
Xiaohuan Xie ◽  
Baojie He ◽  
Amos Darko

Universities spend billions of dollars on green buildings as a sustainability commitment. This research investigates occupant satisfaction with indoor environmental quality (IEQ), building design (BD), and facilities management (FM) in five highly ranked green higher educational buildings in the subtropical climate of Australia, in comparison to nine non-green counterparts. The results disclose that the green building users were more consistently satisfied than the non-green building users with BD&FM elements, such as design, needs from facilities, building image, cleaning, the availability of meeting rooms, and storage. On the other hand, the study revealed weaknesses of green buildings in IEQ, such as noise, ventilation, and artificial lighting. The individual environmental control positively correlated with satisfaction in non-green buildings, but did not significantly affect satisfaction in green buildings. This study also identified the influences of non-environmental factors on occupant satisfaction, such as gender, age, sitting close to a window, hours spent in the building and in the workstation, and the number of people sharing office space. The research provides evidence and guidance for investing in, designing, and managing green educational facilities.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Best ◽  
Brian Purdey

The building that houses the Mirvac School of Sustainable Development at Bond University is the first educational building to achieve a six Green Star rating from the Green Building Council of Australia. It has won numerous awards since opening in August 2008 including being judged the RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) Sustainable Building of 2009. After more than two years in use a post-occupancy evaluation study was carried out to assess the performance of the building from the viewpoint of the users; both resident staff and transient students. Results for factors such as lighting, thermal comfort, noise and air quality. were compared to benchmarks established by the Usable Buildings Trust. The evaluation also assessed the occupants’ perceptions of the building’s impact on their own productivity. Users generally find the building provides a comfortable work environment although a number of areas of performance were noted as posing some concerns. These included intrusive noise in some parts of the building and some issues with glare in daylit teaching spaces. Such concerns were found to be in accord with the results of previous studies and they highlight some recurrent problems in “green” buildings designed to maximise the use of natural ventilation and natural light. These design challenges and how occupant satisfaction is to be measured and benchmarked are also discussed in the context of this comparative building study.


Author(s):  
Ayman M. Zakaria Eraqi ◽  
Walid Abdul-Hady Shoura

In Egypt, people are unable to determine the qualities of appropriate residence that achieves quality and occupant satisfaction, and contributes to sustainability of residential conglomerations. In general, developing countries lack housing information which can be used to enhance quality of residence. Also, the methods of assessing and identifying the appropriate criteria for future residence quality remain traditional ones that cannot address the multiple, conflicting, overlapping aspects to reach a good decision. This calls for using the Analytical Network Process  (ANP), an effective tool for specifying the relative importance of all factors impacting a specific issue for making an appropriate residential decision. In addition, this method provides results for the decision element impacts network within the decision structure; thus contributing to more understanding of the mechanisms and requirements of residence selection. The proposed decision structure comprises a two-level network: main clusters, main elements, and sub-elements included in the demographic characteristics group, the residence criteria group, the demand parameters group, the supply parameters group, the residence specifications group, and the alternatives group which representing, in total, the decision and specifying the percentage needed for each housing level. Results of the model showed complete capacity in smoothly addressing complexities and overlapping in the decision structure. The decision structure showed that 52% chose luxury residence, 28% chose middle-class residence, and 19.5% chose the economic residence. Mechanisms of decision making were analyzed; particularly in terms of relationship to demographic characteristics and residence specifications. Also, the importance and impact of demand / supply parameters in reaching decision were analyzed.


Author(s):  
Asrul Nasid Masrom ◽  
Martin Skitmore

In general, the performance of construction projects, including their sustainability performance, does not meet optimal expectations. One aspect of this is the performance of the participants who are interdependent and make a significance impact on overall project outcomes. Of these participants, the client is traditionally the owner of the project, the architect or engineer is engaged as the lead designer and a contractor is selected to construct the facilities. Generally, the performance of the participants is gauged by considering three main factors, namely, time, cost and quality. As the level of satisfaction is a subjective issue, it is rarely used in the performance evaluation of construction work. Recently, various approaches to the measurement of satisfaction have been made in an attempt to determine the performance of construction project outcomes – for instance, client satisfaction, customer satisfaction, contractor satisfaction, occupant satisfaction and home buyer satisfaction. These not only identify the performance of the construction project but are also used to improve and maintain relationships. In addition, these assessments are necessary for the continuous improvement and enhanced cooperation of participants. The measurement of satisfaction levels primarily involves expectations and perceptions. An expectation can be regarded as a comparative standard of different needs, motives and beliefs, while a perception is a subjective interpretation that is influenced by moods, experiences and values. This suggests that the disparity between perceptions and expectations may possibly be used to represent different levels of satisfaction. However, this concept is rather new and in need of further investigation. This chapter examines the methods commonly practised in measuring satisfaction levels today and the advantages of promoting these methods. The results provide a preliminary review of the advantages of satisfaction measurement in the construction industry and recommendations are made concerning the most appropriate methods to use in identifying the performance of project outcomes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 131-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Gorgolewski ◽  
Craig Brown ◽  
Anne-Mareike Chu ◽  
Adrian Turcato ◽  
Karen Bartlett ◽  
...  

Building performance evaluations (BPEs) were carried out for nine Canadian green buildings using a standardised assessment framework. The aim was to explore and measure the discrepancies between the operational performance of the buildings and their predicted performance, as well as to identify lessons for their owners, design teams and the construction industry. The objective of this paper is not to report individual buildings in detail (we refer the reader to the individual building reports) but to report on some general lessons that came from doing this study. Overall these buildings performed well compared to benchmarks. However, the findings suggest that occupancy is not well understood and often incorrectly predicted during design, and that this affects various aspects of performance, including energy and water use. Also energy and water use modelling is often undertaken principally for building code/green rating compliance purposes and does not necessarily represent an accurate prediction of likely operational use. Combined with variations in occupancy this can lead to considerable discrepancies in performance from the modelled values. This may be understood by experts but is often misleading to building owners and others. Water use is often not well predicted and also not carefully managed in buildings and there is a lack of understanding of what constitutes good water performance. Overall, it is important to recognise that each building has its own individual “story” that provides necessary context for effective management and improvement of the building during its ongoing life. It is proposed that a BPE process allows that context to be better understood, and enables more effective decision making about building management, improvements, occupant satisfaction, energy use, etc.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1420326X2091231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Khoshbakht ◽  
George Baird ◽  
Eziaku O. Rasheed

The influence of work groups (the number of occupants sharing an office) on occupant satisfaction with workplace environments was compared between commercial buildings and academic buildings. Using the Building Use Studies (BUS) methodology, a sample of 5000 surveys was collected over a 12-year period from 67 buildings around the world. In both academic and commercial buildings, solo offices (single occupant) obtained the best scores regarding productivity, overall comfort and health. Academics most disliked middle-sized open-plan offices (shared by 6 to 9 occupants), while in commercial buildings, office occupants most disliked large open-plan offices (shared by over 9 occupants). Occupants had higher productivity and perceived health in commercial buildings than those in academic buildings in all work groups. Productivity decreased as the number of occupants in the office increased in both academic and commercial buildings for all work groups except for middle-sized open-plan offices. Age had a significant influence on occupant perception in different work groups, when comparing commercial and academic buildings. Trivial differences regarding the effect of gender on occupant perception in commercial and academic buildings were also identified. The findings of this study points to the significance of office sharing in influencing high-performance working environments, especially in relation to open-plan layouts.


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