English

Many existing building energy performance assessment frameworks, quantifying and categorising buildings post occupancy, offer limited feedback on design decisions.

This paper presents a numerical model for the analysis of impact of building envelope porosity on energy. In the porous envelope, the infiltrating air entering a building can change in temperature, along the infiltration path due to heat exchange between the air itself and the porous insulation matrix; hence the envelope effectively behaves as a heat exchanger. The presented model is based on combined airflow and heat transfer through porous media. Microscopic energy equations are formulated for solid and gas phases separately.

Behavioural models derived from on-going field studies can provide the basis for predicting personal action taken to adjust lighting levels or remedy direct glare in response to physical conditions. SHOCC, a sub-hourly occupancy-based control model, provides building energy simulation programs, such as ESP-r, access to advanced behavioural models, such as the Lightswitch2002 algorithms intended for manual and automated lighting systems.

Institutional facilities embody the physical infrastructure of the communities they house. Aging institutional buildings, especially those within extensive central campuses, cannot easily be disposed of or abandoned in favour of new facilities. Demolition followed by reconstruction is one alternative, however, this is highly disruptive and often these buildings are historically designated or their replacement value cannot be afforded. 

Improving thermal performance of building envelopes reduces energy consumption of residential buildings. This reduction is better fostered if the thermal analysis is included in the overall performance analysis of the building envelope or the building system. An integrated approach with IT and international standards, such as IFC, can ensure that the building envelope satisfies energy requirements as well as other requirements such as hygrothermal, acoustic, aesthetic, or economic criteria.

Daylight design for “extremely” obstructed urban environment is a relatively uncharted area of scholarship. The reason might be that the problem has not been critically important. No city in the world has an urban density as high as Hong Kong. Deisgning and providing adequate daylight into buildings is a difficult challenge. A key question designers often ask is: If there is a need to build a high density city, what should it look like? What one should or should not do? There are many design variables. This study examined one of them: building heights.

The impact of building regulations on the final form of a design can be quite significant. At the same time, increasingly stringent and more performance-based regulations are leading to a greater reliance on simulation and analysis as a fundamental part of the design process. As a result, the traditional design validate- redesign approach is becoming less viable. This paper argues that an alternate approach based on the generative potential of building regulations is more effective.

This paper presents a study of windbreak sheltering effect on the outdoor open space using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques and the wind tunnel experiments carried out for validating the CFD models. Although the influence of a windbreak on the reduction of wind speed is fairly well known, it is still uncertain how this influence will be affected by the buildings in an urban area where the windbreaks are placed for providing better wind comfort to the people in outdoor open space.

In building simulation, as in several other domains, traditional monolithic simulation codes are still in dominance over simulators based on symbolic equations in a general modeling language. Introduced in 1998, IDA Indoor Climate and Energy has become the first widely spread thermal building performance simulator based on the new technology. Developing a full-fledged dynamic whole-building simulation pro- gram is a formidable endeavor in any  setting  and since the first beta version in 1997 a number of les- sons have been learned.