Abstract
Practical Applications
The authors of each article included in this issue explain how their research is applicable to modern industrial practice.
Using localised weather files to assess overheating in naturally ventilated offices within London's urban heat island
C Demanuele, A Mavrogianni, M Davies, M Kolokotroni and I Rajapaksha
The Greater London Authority has recently developed, with the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers, guidance for developers to address the risk of overheating in buildings via the provision of weather files for London relating to three zones. While such an initiative is welcomed, it may be that a weather file tailored to the building location would be preferable. Of course, this would add further complexity to the process and a view would have to be taken as the viability of such an approach. The work presented in this article, however, suggests that serious consideration should be given to the use of tailored weather data for regulatory purposes.
A low-order canyon model to estimate the influence of canyon shape on the maximum urban heat island effect
GJ Levermore and HKW Cheung
The model is simple and developed in terms applicable to building services engineers, using ventilation rates through the canyon. It also does not require more than the standard weather data available in a CIBSE Test Reference Year or a Design Summer Year. From this model, the UHI effect can be developed to adjust the data from a rural site to that of an urban and city centre site. This is useful for building designers to take account of the UHI effect which they cannot do at present. This would also be useful for UKCP09 data which have been released.
Generating test reference years from the UKCP09 projections and their application in building energy simulations
H Du, CP Underwood and JS Edge
Currently, practitioners can use Test Reference Years for use in building energy simulations. In 2009, the CIBSE released Future Weather Years, which go further by allowing practitioners to explore the thermal and comfort behaviour of buildings at future time horizons thus helping to ‘future proof’ a design. In 2009, the United Kingdom Climate Impacts Programme released a new generation of climate change scenario data (the UKCP09 climate change projections) using probabilistic methods. These are the most comprehensive data yet and provides a greater degree of detail than was available to generate the CIBSE Future Weather Years. It is therefore likely that the new data will gradually become the normal basis for investigating future building thermal and comfort response. In this study, a sample of TRY is generated from the UKCP09 data and applied to the simulation of a sample of ‘real’ buildings. The results are compared with both the existing CIBSE Future Weather Years as well as with Test Reference Years generated using UKCP09 by two other research groups. The results provide a robust way forward for simulating building thermal and comfort response using future weather data.
An analysis of heat insulation efficiency of building outer skins used for green building
W-S Hou, T-F Chuang, E-C Hsieh and Y-H Chang
The objectives of this research are to investigate the heat insulation efficiencies of building outer skins used in the green buildings. The heat capacity, moisture-permeable resistance, solar heat gain cooling load and costs of the building outer skins frequently used in Taiwan have been calculated and collected in this study. Therefore, the engineers and building industry can choose the most suitable materials with the help of the above information.
Comparison study of air mixing modes in liquid desiccant based all-air air conditioning systems
F Xiao and XF Niu
Liquid desiccant based all-air system is quite suitable for museums, libraries and computer centres where water is not allowed to enter the space for property safety and strict thermal-hygrometric control is necessary. The results of this paper provide guidelines on the selection of air mixing modes in liquid desiccant-based all-air systems, considering energy consumption and system COP.
A study on the arrival process of lift passengers in a multi-storey office building
J-M Kuusinen, J Sorsa, M-L Siikonen and H Ehtamo
This article contributes to the basic understanding of passenger behaviour, and how people move around in buildings and arrive at the lift lobbies. It is proposed that the model for the passenger arrival process should take into account that passengers do not always arrive individually but also in batches. The passenger arrival process affects the design of elevators. It will also affect the passenger generation in building traffic simulations.