scholarly journals Building Energy Retrofit Measures in Hot-Summer–Cold-Winter Climates: A Case Study in Shanghai

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 3393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuanda Hong ◽  
Collins I. Ezeh ◽  
Wu Deng ◽  
Sung-Hugh Hong ◽  
Zhen Peng

Building retrofit measures provide a significant means of mitigating the effect of climate change on buildings by enhancing building energy performance at a beneficial cost-effectiveness. An insight into the applicable building retrofit measures within a climate zone will guide the optimisation framework to attaining sustainability in architecture and the built environment. This article presents a brief overview of recent studies on retrofit measures and its application on a variety of buildings in hot-summer–cold-winter climates, with emphasis on Shanghai. Findings show that the major retrofit measures include improvement in the building envelope, heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) and lighting, supported by photovoltaic (PV) systems, accordingly. Furthermore, the study identifies key elements and plausible challenges for the evaluation of building retrofit measures in this region. In this regard, financial barriers and lack of standards and regulatory support are the main challenges identified. These insights provide a systematic approach to guide building researchers, practitioners and decision-makers in the design and development of existing and new retrofit measures for the future of rapidly growing cities with a broad climate variation scope.

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 243-262
Author(s):  
Shahryar Habibi

This study concerns an overall evaluation of building envelopes, for what concerns the energy, acoustic and lighting performances. It combines different topics of energy and indoor comfort, with the aim to improve the livability of an existing building (a social housing) by means of a comprehensive retrofit of their envelopes. The novel contribution of this study is to apply some methods for energy retrofit of a building envelope in such a way that objectives are achieved within the state-of-the-art combination simulation, optimization approaches, and equations describing the calculations of sound insulation in buildings. The results showed that properties of building envelope like the value of transmittance of the glass window and thermal properties of materials have an impact on indoor environmental quality and energy performance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-133
Author(s):  
Gennadiy Farenyuk

The paper presents the basic methodical principles for the time analysis of the variations of envelope structures’ thermal insulation properties and for the substantiation of the thermal reliability criterion, which should allow the analysis of the actual parameters of heat losses during the operation of buildings. In the paper, the state of the envelope structures thermal failure, the concept of building thermal envelope thermal reliability and the principles of its rating are defined. The physical meaning and basic criterion of the envelope structure thermal reliability are formulated. The application of the thermal reliability criterion allows determining the probable variations in the thermal insulation properties during the building operation and, accordingly, the changes of the building energy performance over time.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1049
Author(s):  
Zhang Deng ◽  
Yixing Chen ◽  
Xiao Pan ◽  
Zhiwen Peng ◽  
Jingjing Yang

Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) is arousing interest in building energy modeling, which requires a large building dataset as an input. Building use is a critical parameter to infer archetype buildings for UBEM. This paper presented a case study to determine building use for city-scale buildings by integrating the Geographic Information System (GIS) based point-of-interest (POI) and community boundary datasets. A total of 68,966 building footprints, 281,767 POI data, and 3367 community boundaries were collected for Changsha, China. The primary building use was determined when a building was inside a community boundary (i.e., hospital or residential boundary) or the building contained POI data with main attributes (i.e., hotel or office building). Clustering analysis was used to divide buildings into sub-types for better energy performance evaluation. The method successfully identified building uses for 47,428 buildings among 68,966 building footprints, including 34,401 residential buildings, 1039 office buildings, 141 shopping malls, and 932 hotels. A validation process was carried out for 7895 buildings in the downtown area, which showed an overall accuracy rate of 86%. A UBEM case study for 243 office buildings in the downtown area was developed with the information identified from the POI and community boundary datasets. The proposed building use determination method can be easily applied to other cities. We will integrate the historical aerial imagery to determine the year of construction for a large scale of buildings in the future.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (20) ◽  
pp. 11554
Author(s):  
Fahad Haneef ◽  
Giovanni Pernigotto ◽  
Andrea Gasparella ◽  
Jérôme Henri Kämpf

Nearly-zero energy buildings are now a standard for new constructions. However, the real challenge for a decarbonized society relies in the renovation of the existing building stock, selecting energy efficiency measures considering not only the energy performance but also the economic and sustainability ones. Even if the literature is full of examples coupling building energy simulation with multi-objective optimization for the identification of the best measures, the adoption of such approaches is still limited for district and urban scale simulation, often because of lack of complete data inputs and high computational requirements. In this research, a new methodology is proposed, combining the detailed geometric characterization of urban simulation tools with the simplification provided by “building archetype” modeling, in order to ensure the development of robust models for the multi-objective optimization of retrofit interventions at district scale. Using CitySim as an urban scale energy modeling tool, a residential district built in the 1990s in Bolzano, Italy, was studied. Different sets of renovation measures for the building envelope and three objectives —i.e., energy, economic and sustainability performances, were compared. Despite energy savings from 29 to 46%, energy efficiency measures applied just to the building envelope were found insufficient to meet the carbon neutrality goals without interventions to the system, in particular considering mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. Furthermore, public subsidization has been revealed to be necessary, since none of the proposed measures is able to pay back the initial investment for this case study.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-136
Author(s):  
Chaitali Basu ◽  
Virendra Kumar Paul ◽  
M.G. Matt Syal

The energy performance of an existing building is the amount of energy consumed to meet various needs associated with the standardized use of a building and is reflected in one or more indicators known as Building Energy Performance Indicators (EnPIs). These indicators are distributed amongst six main factors influencing energy consumption: climate, building envelope, building services and energy systems, building operation and maintenance, occupants' activities and behaviour, and indoor environmental quality. Any improvement made to either the existing structure or the physical and operational upgrade of a building system that enhances energy performance is considered an energy efficiency retrofit. The main goal of this research is to support the implementation of multifamily residential building energy retrofits through expert knowledge consensus on EnPIs for energy efficiency retrofit planning. The research methodology consists of a comprehensive literature review which has identified 35 EnPIs for assessing performance of existing residential buildings, followed by a ranking questionnaire survey of experts in the built-environment to arrive at a priority listing of indicators based on mean rank. This was followed by concordance analysis and measure of standard deviation. A total of 280 experts were contacted globally for the survey, and 106 completed responses were received resulting in a 37.85% response rate. The respondents were divided into two groups for analysis: academician/researchers and industry practitioners. The primary outcome of the research is a priority listing of EnPIs based on the quantitative data from the knowledge-base of experts from these two groups. It is the outcome of their perceptions of retrofitting factors and corresponding indicators. A retrofit strategy consists of five phases for retrofitting planning in which the second phase comprises an energy audit and performance assessment and diagnostics. This research substantiates the performance assessment process through the identification of EnPIs.


Author(s):  
Anna Ostańska

The proposed interdisciplinary method of identifying defects in the building envelope insulation enables the user to quickly assess the scale of heat loss problems in occupied buildings. The method rests upon the quantitative analysis of macroscopic infrared images of the buildings. The method was applied in practice to assess effects of thermal upgrade project in Dźbów housing estate in Częstochowa, a city located in southern Poland. The results confirmed the applicability of the method to monitoring energy performance of buildings in use without intervention into the building’s fabric and without disturbing the occupants.


2019 ◽  
Vol 266 ◽  
pp. 01016 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.F.F. Fasna ◽  
Sachie Gunatilake

Poor energy performance of existing buildings worldwide has led to a crucial need to retrofit existing buildings to minimise energy consumption. Among the existing buildings, hotels use as much as 50% of their total expenses on energy and offer significant opportunities for energy efficiency improvement. Yet, comparatively the level of implementation of energy retrofits found to be low, which has attributed to, inter alia, the absence of a clearly defined process for ensuring the delivery of energy retrofit projects and lack of proactive guidance for project teams to ensure that they make the right decisions at the right time to achieve the desired outcomes. Since many energy retrofit projects in existing hotels are carried out with the involvement of an external contractor, or an Energy Service Company (ESCO), this study focuses on investigating the decision-making process in implementing energy retrofits when the project is outsourced to an external party. An in-depth case study is used to obtain insights into the critical decisions to be taken and key activities to be performed throughout the decision-making process. The findings are used to propose a step-by-step decision-making process comprising of three key phases: i.e., pre-retrofit, retrofit implementation and post-retrofit. It is hoped that the decision-making process developed in this study will serve as a roadmap for the effective adoption and implementation of energy retrofits in existing hotel buildings when an external contractor is involved.


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