Drivers for implementing green building technologies : an international survey of experts

2016-2017 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journal201804_a bcm

Parametric Investigation of Traditional Vaulted Roofs in Hot-Arid Climates

In the Mediterranean and North African regions, traditional vaulted roof forms have been widely used due to their significant influence on enhancing thermal indoor conditions. This research parametrically investigates the thermal performance of vaulted roofs, seeking a better understanding of the reciprocal relationship between the solar irradiance received by these roofs and the resulting energy consumption in the hot-arid city of Aswan (23.58oN), Egypt. The methodological procedure is realized through two phases. The annual simulations of solar irradiance and energy consumption are carried out in the first phase, where the quantitative performance of 2,310 different cases are predicted in terms of six vaulted roof forms against eleven key influencing variables. The unsupervised technique of Principal Component Analysis is used in the second phase to reduce the higher dimensionality of the resulting dataset and extract important information from newly established orthogonal principal components. The outcomes of this work aim to provide architects and practitioners with an optimized dataset to use in the design and application of vaulted roof forms and support decision makers addressing the development strategies by providing essential data for setting regulations of newly built environments in harsh hot-arid contexts

Green building for office interiors: challenges and opportunities

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the concept and practice of green building for office interiors: whether the green intent can be effectively implemented in an interior retrofitting project. Design/methodology/approach – Reviewing green building rating systems for interiors, examining certified interior projects and interviewing occupants working in certified green offices. Findings – The green building credits for interiors fall into three relational layers: the urban context, the host building and interior fit-outs. Most projects under study performed well on credits for interior fit-outs (e.g. low emitting materials, energy efficient equipment and appliances, etc.), while underperformed on credits for its host building (e.g. air-conditioning systems, ventilation, etc.). The latter might more significantly affect working experience. The other important green aspects, such as daylight availability, facilities accessibility, might be subject to its location and urban context. Research limitations/implications – This article presents a multi-examination of green interiors. The data came from second-hand Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design scorecards and qualitative interviews. More quantitative surveys are expected to be conducted. Practical implications – Green interior retrofitting should go beyond selecting environmentalfriendly finishes and furniture or resource-efficient fixtures and appliances. It should proactively start from assessing the environmental performance of the host building and its urban context. Originality/value – Most research looked at green building as a whole. Green interiors are actually more practical for tenants who intend to reduce their corporate environmental impacts, whereas they do not have control over whole building design and operations. This article highlights the importance of green interior retrofitting and provides guidance.Griffith Sciences, School of Environment and ScienceFull Tex

A non-linear case-based reasoning approach for retrieval of similar cases and selection of target credits in LEED projects

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a widely used international green building certification program developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Although the need for LEED certification has grown significantly, LEED managers still face challenges in target credit selection and green building technology design. They frequently meet new types of projects with different project characteristics and requirements. Therefore, it would be helpful if LEED managers could refer to other similar certified green building cases when planning and designing LEED projects. However, this is not supported in current studies and research. This paper proposes a case-based reasoning (CBR) approach to provide case studies of similar certified green building projects and suggestions on target LEED credits. Currently, linear formation of Local-Global method is commonly used in the retrieval step of CBR. This paper presents a non-linear formation of Local-Global retrieval based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN), which can provide a higher accuracy. LEED for New Construction (LEED-NC) is the focus of this paper, and 1000 LEED-NC v2009 certified cases were collected for the case base. Pairwise comparison was conducted to generate the local distance (attribute similarity) and the target for training the ANN model. The proposed non-linear CBR approach was tested and evaluated using 20 recently certified projects, and the results showed a prediction accuracy of 80.75% on the LEED credit selection. The results were also compared with those calculated by commonly used linear CBR approaches: Multiple Regression Analysis, Correlation Analysis, and the k-NN approach. The accuracy achieved by these methods was between 71.23% and 77.54%, which was lower than the proposed approach