scholarly journals EPIQR-TOBUS: a new generation of refurbishment decision aid methods / EPIQR-TOBUS: eine neue Generation von Entscheidungshilfen für das Bauinstandsetzen

2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 543-554
Author(s):  
F. Flourentzos ◽  
J.-L. Genre ◽  
C.-A. Roulet ◽  
T. Stôckli

Abstract In a large majority of European countries, the amount of maintenance and refurbishment works represents nearly 50% of the total amount spent in the building sector. New requirements are being added to the necessity of maintaining or re-establishing the building stock's usage value. They are linked to the determination to reduce energy consumption, pollutant emissions, work site wastes, to improve the Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ) and all the modern conveniences inside buildings. Two European projects, EPIQR (réf. nr.: JOR3-CT96-0044) and TOBUS (réf. nr.: JOR3-CT98-Û235), developed in the IIIrd and IVth framework programs put the foundations of a new generation of refurbishment decision aid tools. A structured diagnosis scheme covering the state of deterioration of the building elements, energy performance, indoor environment quality, functional obsolescence offer a new concept which helps architects and engineers to approach the building refurbishment with a global view of the whole process, to take informed decisions, to construct coherent refurbishment scenarii and calculate a reasonable investment budget in the very first stage of the refurbishment project. EPIQR project addresses residential buildings and it has been finished in 1998, TOBUS addresses office buildings and it is still in course. The support of these methods is a multimedia computer program. Several modules help the users to treat the data collected during a diagnosis survey, to set up refurbishment scenarii and calculate their cost or energy performance, and finally to visualise the results in a comprehensive way and to prepare quality reports. This paper presents the structure and the main features of the method and software

Buildings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Zalejska-Jonsson

The study presented in this paper focuses on the subjective opinions of occupants of multistory residential buildings by examining the relationship between occupants’ satisfaction and indoor environment quality, and analysing the effect the problems experienced with noise level may have on general satisfaction and the perceived acoustic quality. The analysis is based on data collected through surveys addressed to adults living in green and conventional buildings. The results show that occupants are very satisfied with their apartments, and subjectively rated acoustic quality received very high scores. The responses indicate that noise from neighbours has been experienced relatively seldom by occupants; however, the analysis shows that it is the factor that has the strongest effect on satisfaction with acoustic quality. We have found that the environmental profile of a building has a significant effect on general satisfaction expressed by occupants; however, this effect has not been confirmed for acoustic quality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 1579 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zanon ◽  
Callegaro ◽  
Albatici

Visual quality is an important component of indoor environment quality and greatly affects inhabitants’ perception of the living space. Nevertheless, the lighting design of residential buildings is usually underestimated by both designers and standards. This paper presents an integrated index for evaluating the visual quality of an indoor environment in residential buildings. The main parameters considered are daylight access, probability of glare from daylight and electric illumination, maintained illuminance, and color temperature. These aspects are evaluated throughout a whole year using a fixed set of metrics and are combined using relative weights. It was decided to also consider qualitative parameters in order to give more importance to some psychological aspects of visual comfort. Finally, the building visual quality index is obtained by a weighted average of the results of each room with the addition of the qualitative parameters. The applicability of the index was tested through the simulation of a dwelling that will be built and monitored in the context of the Comfort for Sustainable Buildings in the Alps (CASA) research project. The building visual quality index proved to be useful during the design process, allowing for improvements in both electric illumination and daylight access through a comparison of different solutions. This study could represent a step towards the holistic evaluation of indoor environment quality.


2015 ◽  
Vol 87 ◽  
pp. 92-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rauno Holopainen ◽  
Kari Salmi ◽  
Erkki Kähkönen ◽  
Pertti Pasanen ◽  
Kari Reijula

Buildings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhonghua Gou

The Special Issue on “Human Factors in Green Building” addresses the design of indoor environment quality for users’ needs. The collected papers cover various building types and the research highlights the different needs of users. In working environments, employees’ stress is the main concern in the workplace design, especially for open plan offices where lack of privacy and over exposure to environmental stress have been reported. In residential environments, residents have great opportunities to adjust their environments to suit their needs; therefore, passive design such as natural ventilation is explored in residential buildings with climates such as cold or humid tropical. In healthcare environments, the papers in this issue are concerned with the needs of patients, especially the older adults who require special care. In learning environments, thermal and visual aspects are investigated for optimal comfort conditions and learning outcomes. The special issue demonstrates insightful critical thinking of indoor environment quality and proposes a new understanding for more practical design solutions. This editorial note is a brief review of the 12 papers, concluding with reflections about design of built environments to meet users’ needs.


2011 ◽  
Vol 71-78 ◽  
pp. 3520-3523
Author(s):  
Xue Bin Yang ◽  
De Fa Sun ◽  
Xiang Jiang Zhou ◽  
Ji Chun Yang

This study reviews some published literatures on the benchmarking and ranking guidelines, tools and comparison of buildings. Energy performance, Indoor air quality and thermal comfort can be covered for the rating tools for buildings. Further, the energy performance can also be calculated by the other parameters related to the room thermal properties. A rating system to benchmark buildings can employ several parameters including indoor environment quality, clothing volume, predicted mean vote, operative temperature, and thermal energy consumption. It can be concluded that the indoor air quality or thermal comfort can be used to evaluate buildings due to their influence on the occupant satisfaction and job performance. Also, building benchmarking or rating will be various because Different comfort criteria may lead to different comfort temperature.


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