scholarly journals Development of a Mosque Design for a Hot, Dry Climate Based on a Holistic Bioclimatic Vision

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6254
Author(s):  
Atef Ahriz ◽  
Abdelhakim Mesloub ◽  
Khaled Elkhayat ◽  
Mohammed A Alghaseb ◽  
Mohamed Hassan Abdelhafez ◽  
...  

Over 50% of the total energy consumed by buildings in a hot and dry climate goes toward the cooling regime during the harsh months. Non-residential buildings, especially houses of worship, need a tremendous amount of energy to create a comfortable environment for worshipers. Today, mosques are regarded as energy-hungry buildings, whereas in the past, they were designed according to sustainable vernacular architecture. This study was aimed at improving the energy performance of mosques in a hot and dry climate using bioclimatic principles and architectural elements. To achieve this aim, a process-based simulation approach was applied together with a generate and test technique on 86 scenarios based on 10 architectural elements, with various arithmetic transition rates organized in 9 successive steps. Starting from a simplified hypothetical model, the final model of the mosque design was arrived at based on a holistic bioclimatic vision using 10 architectural elements. The findings of this research were limited to a specific mosque size in a hot and dry climate, but the proposed holistic bioclimatic concept can be developed to take into account all mosque models in several harsh environments.

Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 587 ◽  
Author(s):  
İdil Ayçam ◽  
Sevilay Akalp ◽  
Leyla Senem Görgülü

Conventional energy use has brought environmental problems such as global warming and accelerated efforts to reduce energy consumption in many areas, particularly in the housing sector. For this purpose, bioclimatic design principles and vernacular architecture parameters have started to be examined in residential buildings nowadays. Thus, the demand for less energy-consuming houses has started to increase. In this study, we aimed to specify the significance of traditional architectural parameters for houses in the hot-dry climatic region of Diyarbakır, Turkey. Within the scope of the study, a case was based on the urban fabric of the traditional houses in Historical Diyarbakir Suriçi-Old Town settlement and the Şilbe Mass Housing Area was discussed. The courtyard types, settlement patterns, and street texture of traditional Diyarbakır houses were modeled by using DesignBuilder energy simulation program for the case study. Annual heating, cooling, and total energy loads were calculated, and their thermal performances were compared. The aim is to create a less energy-consuming and sustainable environment with the adaptation of traditional building form-street texture to today’s housing sector. Development of a settlement model, which is based on traditional houses’ bioclimatic design for hot-dry region, was intended to be applied in the modern housing sector of Turkey. Moreover, adapting local forms, urban texture, and settlement patterns to today has significant potential for sustainable architecture and energy-efficient buildings. According to this study, the optimum form and layout of traditional houses, which are one of the climate balanced building designs, provide annual energy savings if integrated and designed in today’s building construction. As a result of this study, if the passive design alternatives such as building shape, layout, and orientation were developed in the first stage of the design, energy efficient building design would be possible. The study is important for the continuation of traditional sustainable design.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ole Øiene Smedegård ◽  
Bjørn Aas ◽  
Jørn Stene ◽  
Laurent Georges ◽  
Salvatore Carlucci

AbstractDuring the last few decades, focus on measures for energy conservation in buildings has increased considerably. The European Commission implemented the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, which gave instructions to the member states about how to reduce energy consumption in residential and non-residential buildings. In the process of making the building sector more energy efficient, the building codes generally have become stricter with some simplifications applied in the requirements. For swimming facilities in Norway, these simplifications are undermining the purpose of the code by excluding the energy use related to the operation of swimming pools, which is the main part of the energy use in this building category. In other words, the energy use related to operation of the facility is not regulated. Furthermore, guidelines for the planning and operation of these types of facilities are outdated and research for this building category is sparse. These three aspects mean that there is a considerable potential for improvement. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review with bibliometric and thematic analyses of the contextualized research in swimming facilities from a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning perspective. It maps the major trends during the past few decades, where areas like solar heating for outdoor pools, energy consumption, and air quality stand out. Except for air quality and disinfection by-products, research on these facilities is highly fragmented without any strong contributors to the various fields. Graphical abstract


Materials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 3241
Author(s):  
Krzysztof Powała ◽  
Andrzej Obraniak ◽  
Dariusz Heim

The implemented new legal regulations regarding thermal comfort, the energy performance of residential buildings, and proecological requirements require the design of new building materials, the use of which will improve the thermal efficiency of newly built and renovated buildings. Therefore, many companies producing building materials strive to improve the properties of their products by reducing the weight of the materials, increasing their mechanical properties, and improving their insulating properties. Currently, there are solutions in phase-change materials (PCM) production technology, such as microencapsulation, but its application on a large scale is extremely costly. This paper presents a solution to the abovementioned problem through the creation and testing of a composite, i.e., a new mixture of gypsum, paraffin, and polymer, which can be used in the production of plasterboard. The presented solution uses a material (PCM) which improves the thermal properties of the composite by taking advantage of the phase-change phenomenon. The study analyzes the influence of polymer content in the total mass of a composite in relation to its thermal conductivity, volumetric heat capacity, and diffusivity. Based on the results contained in this article, the best solution appears to be a mixture with 0.1% polymer content. It is definitely visible in the tests which use drying, hardening time, and paraffin absorption. It differs slightly from the best result in the thermal conductivity test, while it is comparable in terms of volumetric heat capacity and differs slightly from the best result in the thermal diffusivity test.


Buildings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Daniel Satola ◽  
Martin Röck ◽  
Aoife Houlihan-Wiberg ◽  
Arild Gustavsen

Improving the environmental life cycle performance of buildings by focusing on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions along the building life cycle is considered a crucial step in achieving global climate targets. This paper provides a systematic review and analysis of 75 residential case studies in humid subtropical and tropical climates. The study investigates GHG emissions across the building life cycle, i.e., it analyses both embodied and operational GHG emissions. Furthermore, the influence of various parameters, such as building location, typology, construction materials and energy performance, as well as methodological aspects are investigated. Through comparative analysis, the study identifies promising design strategies for reducing life cycle-related GHG emissions of buildings operating in subtropical and tropical climate zones. The results show that life cycle GHG emissions in the analysed studies are mostly dominated by operational emissions and are the highest for energy-intensive multi-family buildings. Buildings following low or net-zero energy performance targets show potential reductions of 50–80% for total life cycle GHG emissions, compared to buildings with conventional energy performance. Implementation of on-site photovoltaic (PV) systems provides the highest reduction potential for both operational and total life cycle GHG emissions, with potential reductions of 92% to 100% and 48% to 66%, respectively. Strategies related to increased use of timber and other bio-based materials present the highest potential for reduction of embodied GHG emissions, with reductions of 9% to 73%.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1595
Author(s):  
Valeria Todeschi ◽  
Roberto Boghetti ◽  
Jérôme H. Kämpf ◽  
Guglielmina Mutani

Building energy-use models and tools can simulate and represent the distribution of energy consumption of buildings located in an urban area. The aim of these models is to simulate the energy performance of buildings at multiple temporal and spatial scales, taking into account both the building shape and the surrounding urban context. This paper investigates existing models by simulating the hourly space heating consumption of residential buildings in an urban environment. Existing bottom-up urban-energy models were applied to the city of Fribourg in order to evaluate the accuracy and flexibility of energy simulations. Two common energy-use models—a machine learning model and a GIS-based engineering model—were compared and evaluated against anonymized monitoring data. The study shows that the simulations were quite precise with an annual mean absolute percentage error of 12.8 and 19.3% for the machine learning and the GIS-based engineering model, respectively, on residential buildings built in different periods of construction. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis using the Morris method was carried out on the GIS-based engineering model in order to assess the impact of input variables on space heating consumption and to identify possible optimization opportunities of the existing model.


Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Ilyas Mohammed

Decolonisation of knowledge over the past few years has gained much traction among scholars and students in many countries. This situation has led to calls for the decolonisation of knowledge, academia, the university, and university curricula. That said, the knowledge production side of the terrorism industry, which sits inside academia, so far has escaped calls to decolonise. This situation is somewhat surprising because the terrorism industry has had a tremendous impact on many countries, especially Muslim majority ones. The 9/11 terrorist attacks have resulted in a tremendous amount of knowledge being produced and published on terrorism and counterterrorism. However, little is known about “who is publishing on terrorism and where they are based”. To this end, this paper adopts a decolonial approach and addresses the questions of “who is publishing on terrorism and where they are based” by analysing seven terrorism journals. It argues that most of the publications and knowledge on terrorism in the seven terrorism journals are produced by scholars with Western heritage and are based at Western institutions, which is connected to the coloniality of knowledge.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 6018
Author(s):  
Theo Lynn ◽  
Pierangelo Rosati ◽  
Antonia Egli ◽  
Stelios Krinidis ◽  
Komninos Angelakoglou ◽  
...  

The building stock accounts for a significant portion of worldwide energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. While the majority of the existing building stock has poor energy performance, deep renovation efforts are stymied by a wide range of human, technological, organisational and external environment factors across the value chain. A key challenge is integrating appropriate human resources, materials, fabrication, information and automation systems and knowledge management in a proper manner to achieve the required outcomes and meet the relevant regulatory standards, while satisfying a wide range of stakeholders with differing, often conflicting, motivations. RINNO is a Horizon 2020 project that aims to deliver a set of processes that, when working together, provide a system, repository, marketplace and enabling workflow process for managing deep renovation projects from inception to implementation. This paper presents a roadmap for an open renovation platform for managing and delivering deep renovation projects for residential buildings based on seven design principles. We illustrate a preliminary stepwise framework for applying the platform across the full-lifecycle of a deep renovation project. Based on this work, RINNO will develop a new open renovation software platform that will be implemented and evaluated at four pilot sites with varying construction, regulatory, market and climate contexts.


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