scholarly journals Occupant behavior: a “new” factor in energy performance of buildings. Methods for its detection in houses and in offices.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilena De Simone ◽  
Gianmarco Fajilla
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Occupant Behavior ◽  
Energy Usage ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Energy Performance Of Buildings ◽  
And Performance

The role that occupants have on energy consumption and performance of buildings is known, but still requires a great deal of research. In this paper, the most common techniques to detect occupancy and occupant behavior in buildings are categorized with their advantages and disadvantages. Being the buildings characterized by different energy usage, the presentation of the studies that applied surveys and monitoring campaigns is conducted with a differentiation between residential and office buildings.

scholarly journals The Performance Gap in Energy-Efficient Office Buildings: How the Occupants Can Help?

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qadeer Ali ◽  
Muhammad Jamaluddin Thaheem ◽  
Fahim Ullah ◽  
Samad M. E. Sepasgozar
Keyword(s):  
Energy Efficient ◽  
Behavioral Interventions ◽  
Energy Use ◽  
Energy Savings ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Occupant Behavior ◽  
Energy Usage ◽  
Performance Gap ◽  
Energy Efficient Buildings

Rising demand and limited production of electricity are instrumental in spreading the awareness of cautious energy use, leading to the global demand for energy-efficient buildings. This compels the construction industry to smartly design and effectively construct these buildings to ensure energy performance as per design expectations. However, the research tells a different tale: energy-efficient buildings have performance issues. Among several reasons behind the energy performance gap, occupant behavior is critical. The occupant behavior is dynamic and changes over time under formal and informal influences, but the traditional energy simulation programs assume it as static throughout the occupancy. Effective behavioral interventions can lead to optimized energy use. To find out the energy-saving potential based on simulated modified behavior, this study gathers primary building and occupant data from three energy-efficient office buildings in major cities of Pakistan and categorizes the occupants into high, medium, and low energy consumers. Additionally, agent-based modeling simulates the change in occupant behavior under the direct and indirect interventions over a three-year period. Finally, energy savings are quantified to highlight a 25.4% potential over the simulation period. This is a unique attempt at quantifying the potential impact on energy usage due to behavior modification which will help facility managers to plan and execute necessary interventions and software experts to develop effective tools to model the dynamic usage behavior. This will also help policymakers in devising subtle but effective behavior training strategies to reduce energy usage. Such behavioral retrofitting comes at a much lower cost than the physical or technological retrofit options to achieve the same purpose and this study establishes the foundation for it.

scholarly journals A Comparative Study: Energy Performance Analysis of Conventional Office Buildings at Lucknow

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-34
Author(s):  
Farheen Bano ◽  
Vandana Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Time Use ◽  
Energy Savings ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Building Envelope ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Energy Audit ◽  
Energy Usage ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Using Data

In this study, the energy consumption of three government and three private office buildings in Lucknow was investigated, and the energy performance index (EPI) for each building was determined. The main purpose of this research was to assess the energy usage of the buildings and identify factors affecting the energy usage. An analysis was performed using data from an energy audit of government buildings, electricity bills of private office buildings, and an on-site visit to determine building envelope materials and its systems. The annual energy consumption of buildings has been evaluated through EPI. The EPI, measured in kilowatt hour per square meter per year, is annual energy consumption in kilowatt hours divided by the gross floor area of the building in square meters. In this study, the energy benchmark for day-time-use office buildings in composite climate specified by Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) has been compared with the energy consumption of the selected buildings. Consequently, it has been found that the average EPI of the selected buildings was close to the national energy benchmark indicated by ECBC. Moreover, factors causing inefficient energy consumption were determined, and solutions for consistent energy savings are suggested for buildings in composite climate.

scholarly journals A Fundamental Study on the Development of New Energy Performance Index in Office Buildings

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (8) ◽  
pp. 2064
Author(s):  
Jin-Hee Kim ◽  
Seong-Koo Son ◽  
Gyeong-Seok Choi ◽  
Young-Tag Kim ◽  
Sung-Bum Kim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Energy Requirement ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Light Transmittance ◽  
Wall Structure ◽  
Fundamental Study ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
U Value ◽  
The Impact

Recently, there have been significant concerns regarding excessive energy use in office buildings with a large window-to-wall ratio (WWR) because of the curtain wall structure. However, prior research has confirmed that the impact of the window area on energy consumption varies depending on building size. A newly proposed window-to-floor ratio (WFR) correlates better with energy consumption in the building. In this paper, we derived the correlation by analyzing a simulation using EnergyPlus, and the results are as follows. In the case of small buildings, the results of this study showed that the WWR and energy requirement increase proportionally, and the smaller the size is, the higher the energy sensitivity will be. However, results also confirmed that this correlation was not established for buildings approximately 3600 m2 or larger. Nevertheless, from analyzing the correlation between the WFR and the energy requirements, it could be deduced that energy required increased proportionally when the WFR was 0.1 or higher. On the other hand, the correlation between WWR, U-value, solar heat gain coefficient (SHGC), and material property values of windows had little effect on energy when the WWR was 20%, and the highest effect was seen at a WWR of 100%. Further, with an SHGC below 0.3, the energy requirement decreased with an increasing WWR, regardless of U-value. In addition, we confirmed the need for in-depth research on the impact of the windows’ U-value, SHGC, and WWR, and this will be verified through future studies. In future studies on window performance, U-value, SHGC, visible light transmittance (VLT), wall U-value as sensitivity variables, and correlation between WFR and building size will be examined.

scholarly journals Energy-Performance Scalability Analysis of a Novel Quasi-Stochastic Computing Approach

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Prashanthi Metku ◽  
Ramu Seva ◽  
Minsu Choi
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Computation Time ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Stochastic Computing ◽  
Detection Circuit ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Efficient Approximation ◽  
Conventional Counterpart ◽  
Computing Approach

Stochastic computing (SC) is an emerging low-cost computation paradigm for efficient approximation. It processes data in forms of probabilities and offers excellent progressive accuracy. Since SC’s accuracy heavily depends on the stochastic bitstream length, generating acceptable approximate results while minimizing the bitstream length is one of the major challenges in SC, as energy consumption tends to linearly increase with bitstream length. To address this issue, a novel energy-performance scalable approach based on quasi-stochastic number generators is proposed and validated in this work. Compared to conventional approaches, the proposed methodology utilizes a novel algorithm to estimate the computation time based on the accuracy. The proposed methodology is tested and verified on a stochastic edge detection circuit to showcase its viability. Results prove that the proposed approach offers a 12–60% reduction in execution time and a 12–78% decrease in the energy consumption relative to the conventional counterpart. This excellent scalability between energy and performance could be potentially beneficial to certain application domains such as image processing and machine learning, where power and time-efficient approximation is desired.

scholarly journals Energy Audit and Analysis of an Institutional Building under Subtropical Climate

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 845 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yazed Yasin Ghadi ◽  
Ali M. Baniyounes
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Energy Savings ◽  
Environmental Parameters ◽  
Subtropical Climate ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Energy Usage ◽  
Climate Conditions ◽  
Heating And Cooling ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Heating And Cooling Load

<p>Evaluation and estimation of energy consumption are essential in order to classify the amount of energy used and the way it is utilized in building. Hence, the possibility of any energy savings potential and energy savings opportunities can be identified. The intention of this article is to study and evaluate energy usage pattern of the Central Queensland University campus’ buildings, Queensland, Australia. This article presents the field survey results from the audit of an office building and performance-related measurements of the indoor environmental parameters, for instance, indoor air temperature, humidity and energy consumption concerned to the indoor heating and cooling load. Monthly observed energy usage information was employed to investigate influence of the climate conditions on energy usage.</p>

scholarly journals CoLocateMe: Aggregation-based, Energy, Performance and Cost Aware VM Placement and Consolidation in Heterogeneous IaaS Clouds

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Zakarya ◽  
Lee Gillam ◽  
Khaled Salah ◽  
Omer F. Rana ◽  
Santosh Tirunagari ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Empirical Evaluation ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Vm Placement ◽  
Placement Decisions ◽  
New Directions ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Placement Policies ◽  
The Impact

In many production clouds, with the notable exception of Google, aggregation-based VM placement policies are used to provision datacenter resources energy and performance efficiently. However, if VMs with similar workloads are placed onto the same machines, they might suffer from contention, particularly, if they are competing for similar resources. High levels of resource contention may degrade VMs performance, and, therefore, could potentially increase users' costs and infrastructure's energy consumption. Furthermore, segregation-based methods result in stranded resources and, therefore, less economics. The recent industrial interest in segregating workloads opens new directions for research. In this paper, we demonstrate how aggregation and segregation-based VM placement policies lead to variabilities in energy efficiency, workload performance, and users' costs. We, then, propose various approaches to aggregation-based placement and migration. We investigate through a number of experiments, using Microsoft Azure and Google's workload traces for more than twelve thousand hosts and a million VMs, the impact of placement decisions on energy, performance, and costs. Our extensive simulations and empirical evaluation demonstrate that, for certain workloads, aggregation-based allocation and consolidation is ~9.61% more energy and ~20.0% more performance efficient than segregation-based policies. Moreover, various aggregation metrics, such as runtimes and workload types, offer variations in energy consumption and performance, therefore, users' costs.<br>

scholarly journals ENERGY RETROFITS FOR IMPROVING ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN BUILDINGS: A REVIEW OF HVAC AND LIGHTING SYSTEMS

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.R. Amjath ◽  
◽  
H. Chandanie ◽  
S.D.I.A. Amarasinghe ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Energy Use ◽  
Implementation Process ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
Existing Buildings ◽  
Energy Auditing ◽  
Lighting Systems ◽  
Effective Decision Making ◽  
And Performance

It has been observed that inefficient buildings consume three to five times more energy than efficient buildings. Subsequently, improving the Energy Efficiency (EE) of existing buildings, which account for a significant portion of the energy consumption of the building sector, has become a top priority. Also, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and lighting systems typically account for three-quarters of a building's energy consumption. Hence, focus on the energy efficiency improvements associated with these subsystems is entailed to optimise the energy use of buildings in comparison to other energy consumers. Energy Retrofit (ER) is defined as the main approach in improving the energy efficiency of buildings to achieve energy reduction goals. Nevertheless, there is a general lack of awareness regarding ER. Thus, the purpose of this article is to bridge this research gap by critically reviewing the applicable literature on ER. The paper first analysed the role of retrofits in buildings concerning optimising energy performance. The paper also discusses the implementation process of ER, which includes five steps viz. pre-retrofit survey, energy auditing, and performance assessment, identification of suitable and feasible retrofit options, site implementation and commissioning, and validation and verification. Further, different types of ER applicable to HVAC and lighting systems are discussed. In their endeavor to enhance the EE of existing buildings, practitioners could apply the findings of this study, as a basis to understand the available ER types and as a measure to gauge the efficiency of existing buildings, which will facilitate effective decision-making.

scholarly journals Achieving a More Sustainable and Fair Society: How Individual and Collective Action Shape the Energy Efficiency of Buildings / Conseguindo uma Sociedade Mais Sustentável e Justa: Como a Ação Individual e Coletiva Molda a Eficiência Energética dos Edifícios

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Parejo-Navajas
Keyword(s):  
Energy Efficiency ◽  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Energy Use ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Energy Performance Of Buildings ◽  
Use Behavior ◽  
Development Objective

AbstractThe behavior of occupants in buildings has an enormous impact on their energy consumption. Despite the efforts to improve the energy efficiency in buildings, there are still many barriers that need to be overcome. Behavior change measures -to improve the energy performance of buildings- are focused on both, the design and the use and operation of buildings. If we are really committed to achieving the sustainable development objective to improve our society’s well-being, special attention should be put into energy use behavior as it has been proven to be an effective way for improvement. ResumoO comportamento dos ocupantes em edifícios tem um enorme impacto no seu consumo de energia. Apesar dos esforços para melhorar a eficiência energética nos edifícios, ainda há muitas barreiras que precisam ser superadas. Medidas de mudança de condutas - para melhorar o desempenho energético dos edifícios - são focadas tanto no design como na utilização e operação de edifícios. Se estamos realmente empenhados em alcançar o objetivo de desenvolvimento sustentável para melhorar o bem-estar da nossa sociedade, uma atenção particular deve ser proporcionada em relação as condutas que influem no uso cotidiano de energia, uma vez que se provou ser um meio eficaz de progresso.

IMPACT OF RETROFITTING ENERGY-EFFICIENT DESIGN STRATEGIES ON ENERGY USE OF EXISTING COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS: COMPARATIVE STUDY OF LOW-IMPACT AND DEEP RETROFIT STRATEGIES

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ajla Aksamija
Keyword(s):  
Energy Consumption ◽  
Energy Efficient ◽  
Hvac Systems ◽  
Building Envelope ◽  
Energy Modeling ◽  
Office Buildings ◽  
Existing Buildings ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Energy Usage ◽  
Building Systems

This article discusses energy-efficient retrofitting design strategies for commercial office buildings, and examines their effect on energy consumption. The objective of the research was to study how to integrate passive design strategies and energy-efficient building systems to improve building performance, and reduce the energy consumption of existing buildings in three different climate types (cold, mixed and hot climates). First, properties of existing buildings were analyzed based on national CBECS database to determine typical characteristics of office buildings located in Chicago, Baltimore and Phoenix, including size, building envelope treatment and building systems. Then, fourteen different prototypes were developed, varying the building shape and orientation to represent different building stock, and energy modeling was conducted to establish energy usage baseline. Multiple design considerations were investigated based on extensive energy simulations and modeling, where low-impact and deep retrofits were considered. Low-impact strategies included improvements to the building envelope, lighting systems and optimization of HVAC systems operation (without upgrading heating and cooling equipment). Deep energy retrofits also included improvements to building envelope and lighting, and considered changes and improvements to HVAC systems (specifically, integration of radiant systems). Energy modeling was conducted for all prototypes, and results were obtained for the baseline (current energy usage), and energy usage considering low-impact design strategies and deep retrofits. A total of 126 energy models was developed, simulated and analyzed, providing a dataset that captured energy usage for investigated scenarios. The comparative analysis of simulation results was used to determine how specific techniques lead to energy savings in different climate types, as well as for buildings of various shapes and orientations.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document