Simplification and Improvement of the Efficiency of Testing Thermophysical Properties of Facade Composite Materials

The choice of highly efficient materials for the opaque parts of the building facades is the most effective factor in increasing its thermal protection. A decrease in the coefficient of U-value of opaque parts of a building directly affects the consumption of both thermal energy and the energy demand for cooling. Two-component or multi-component composite materials today occupy a large place in modern construction. This article analyzes the methodology for testing the thermophysical properties of these materials, reveals a new approach to determine to it, taking into account the links between the thermal conductivity and the thermal diffusivity of materials. The article analyzes the relationship between buildings and the surfaces of the outer envelope and the dependence of the energy efficiency index of the building.

A literature review on Building Integrated Solar Energy Systems (BI-SES) for façades − photovoltaic, thermal and hybrid systems

The building façade has a crucial role in acting as the interface between the environment and the indoor ambient, and from an engineering and architecture perspective, in the last years, there has been a growing focus on the strategic development of building façades. In this sense, this work aims to present a literature review for the Building Integrated Solar Energy Systems (BI-SES) for façades, subdivided into three categories: thermal, photovoltaic and hybrid (both thermal and photovoltaic). The methodology used corresponds to a systematic review method. A sample of 75 works was reviewed (16 works on thermal BI-SES, 37 works on photovoltaic BI-SES, 22 works on hybrid BI-SES). This article summarises the works and later classifies them according to the type of study (numerical or experimental), simulation tool, parametric analysis and performance when applied.

SYSTEMATIC INVENTORY FOR HERITAGE SHOPHOUSE FACADES IN IPOH, PERAK, MALAYSIA

Nowadays, many heritage shophouses remain intact in major urban areas in Malaysia, including Ipoh, Perak. These architectural assets are significant as they portray the glory and achievements of Ipoh over the centuries. However, some shophouses face inappropriate façade changes due to improper conservation activities performed on the heritage properties. These situations have resulted in the phenomenon of inconsistency elements of building facades. Therefore, this paper focuses on two aspects regarding heritage shophouse facades; first, developing the taxonomy of architectural styles according to the tangible elements, and second, classifying and grading the architectural styles. Then, an inventory form named eFakad was developed as a tool to evaluate 65 shophouses at Jalan Sultan Iskandar, Ipoh. The result shows that 49% of facades are in excellent condition, but the rest of the facades need to be conserved and maintained, particularly roof finishes, windows and doors. By applying eFakad inventory form, the documentation and conservation management of the heritage shophouses can be done systematically. Consequently, the stakeholders will be aware of the main problems faced by the heritage shophouses through the inventory record and appropriate actions can be taken in preserving the integrity of the facades. Additionally, the local authority may use the information to improve the existing conservation guidelines.

Reducing the Natural Convection Inside an Enclosure Using a Concentric Internal Open Square

This paper presents the results of a numerical simulation for the natural convection inside an enclosure that has an inner open square at its center. The inner square is open at the top and connected to the ceiling of the enclosure. The open inner square distorts the convection patterns, slows down the flow, and provides a compartment to confine the fluid at the core of the enclosure. Ultimately, this lowers the local Nusselt number, Nu, along the hot wall, and reduces the heat flux through the enclosure. The analysis shows the effects of changing the dimensions of the inner square on the heat flux through the enclosure for a range of Ryleigh numbers from 103 to 106. Short-sided inner squares work as flow deflectors while long-sided inner squares provide compartments to accommodate new flow circulation at the core of the enclosure. The inner square is most effective when the length of its sides equals the width of the stagnant core inside the empty enclosure at the same Ryleigh number, and the heat flux at this condition is the lowest. Inner squares made of thermally conducting materials can reduce the heat flux through the enclosure by 70%, while adiabatic inner squares can reduce the heat flux by 90%. Inner squares reduce the external heat load on buildings when fitted inside the holes of hollow bricks used in building facades. The external heat flux can be lowered by 30%-55% depending on the square material and outer side temperature.

Enhancing the aesthetic aspect of the solar systems used as facades for building by designing multi-layer optical coatings

The design of zero-energy buildings can be depending on the effective integration of solar energy systems with building envelopes, where these systems save heat and electricity as well as enhance the aesthetic aspect of the facades. In this paper, the aspects related to the effective integration of buildings with solar energy systems (solar cells and collectors) will be discussed, as well as enhancing the aesthetic aspect of the facades, and since solar energy systems are visible to everyone, their design must adapt to the building structure and the surrounding environment. Solar energy system designers, architects, physicists and other contributors to building energy envelopes must consider the comprehensive concept of it, where buildings are part of the human and social environment and in close relationship with the natural environment, through the use of thin films technology through the design of multi-layers colored optical coatings covering solar panels for building facades. Accordingly, the energy sector should be seen as an area of aesthetic creativity. Two dielectric materials were used, the first is ThF4 with a high refractive index (1.5143) and the second is LiF with a low refractive index (1.393) and for several odd layers, starting from 3 layers and up to 21 layers and for a thicknesses of a quarter wavelength. The design Air/L/H/Glass was applied by the Mat Lab program for the seven colors of the spectrum, So, the aim of this research is determined in designing colored optical coatings for solar systems that enhance the aesthetic aspect of building facades, as well as generating thermal and electrical energy needed to operate the buildings and to find out which color has the best visible reflectivity and solar transmittance better than the rest of the spectrum, all the results exhibit that yellow color has the higher visible reflectivity and higher merit factor, so it is consider the most efficient color for coloring the solar systems than the rest of colors spectrum.

AFGL-Net: Attentive Fusion of Global and Local Deep Features for Building Façades Parsing

In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework, namely AFGL-Net to achieve building façade parsing, i.e., obtaining the semantics of small components of building façade, such as windows and doors. To this end, we present an autoencoder embedding position and direction encoding for local feature encoding. The autoencoder enhances the local feature aggregation and augments the representation of skeleton features of windows and doors. We also integrate the Transformer into AFGL-Net to infer the geometric shapes and structural arrangements of façade components and capture the global contextual features. These global features can help recognize inapparent windows/doors from the façade points corrupted with noise, outliers, occlusions, and irregularities. The attention-based feature fusion mechanism is finally employed to obtain more informative features by simultaneously considering local geometric details and the global contexts. The proposed AFGL-Net is comprehensively evaluated on Dublin and RueMonge2014 benchmarks, achieving 67.02% and 59.80% mIoU, respectively. We also demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AFGL-Net by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods and various ablation studies.