Review
Construction & Building Technology
Cyrus Ho Hin Wong, Meng Cai, Chao Ren, Ying Huang, Cuiping Liao, Shi Yin
Summary: This paper reviews and compares major methods for simulating building energy use at the urban scale, highlighting differences in strengths, limitations, and applications. It suggests that future development in urban-scale building energy use should explore ways to incorporate spatial variation in weather and morphological conditions, especially in dense urban settings facing greater environmental challenges.
BUILDING AND ENVIRONMENT
(2021)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Rezvan Mohammadiziazi, Samuel Copeland, Melissa M. Bilec
Summary: The study proposes a structure using commercial buildings to improve reproducibility of urban building energy models and introduces an innovative framework for facade reconstruction through photogrammetry and image processing. Twenty archetypes were identified in commercial buildings of different use types, showing discrepancies in energy use among buildings with similar use types.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2021)
Article
Thermodynamics
Zhang Deng, Kavan Javanroodi, Vahid M. M. Nik, Yixing Chen
Summary: The building sector faces challenges in achieving carbon neutrality due to climate change and urbanization. Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) is an effective method to understand building energy use at the urban scale and evaluate retrofit scenarios against future weather variations, supporting carbon emission reduction policies. This study integrates future weather data with a UBEM approach to assess the impacts of climate change on urban energy performance.
BUILDING SIMULATION
(2023)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Laura Carnieletto, Martina Ferrando, Lorenzo Teso, Kaiyu Sun, Wanni Zhang, Francesco Causone, Piercarlo Romagnoni, Angelo Zarrella, Tianzhen Hong
Summary: This study investigated the Italian building stock and developed 46 building prototypes, including residential and office buildings. The contributions of the study include detailed Italian building energy model specifications and a GeoJSON dataset of Italian urban buildings, supporting national building energy efficiency and environmental goals.
BUILDING AND ENVIRONMENT
(2021)
Article
Energy & Fuels
Brett Bass, Joshua New, Nicholas Clinton, Mark Adams, Bill Copeland, Charles Amoo
Summary: Residential and commercial buildings in the United States account for a significant portion of energy consumption. Building energy modeling and urban building energy modeling are useful tools for optimizing energy efficiency. However, there is a knowledge gap in comparing these models to actual measured data. This study used national-scale data and AutoBEM software to model buildings in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and found that building type and year of construction are major sources of bias.
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Gizem Akkose, Cagla Meral Akgul, Ipek Gursel Dino
Summary: This study investigates the impact of CC&UHI on educational building performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of passive retrofit scenarios targeting CC&UHI mitigation and adaptation.
JOURNAL OF BUILDING ENGINEERING
(2021)
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Chunyan Wang, Hanying Jiang, Hao Wu, Yi Liu, Siyue Guo, Ming Xu
Summary: This study examines the scaling relationships between energy consumption and building size at the building level in 16 urban regions in the United States from 2011 to 2019. The findings indicate that the scaling exponents are evolving towards linear scaling, with some fluctuations observed in certain cities. These scaling exponents are negatively correlated with regional climate. Additionally, the study highlights the importance of building types and energy structures in influencing building energy consumption.
JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Thermodynamics
Jacopo Famiglietti, Hashem Amini Toosi, Alice Denarie, Mario Motta
Summary: This study presents a new tool that utilizes a data-driven approach to conduct an extensive environmental evaluation of buildings in the city of Milan. The results reveal that space heating service is the primary contributor to climate change impact. The tool's novelty lies in its expansion of the life cycle assessment method at the urban scale and its potential use in establishing environmental benchmarks for building policies and energy requalification initiatives.
ENERGY CONVERSION AND MANAGEMENT
(2022)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Wei Wang, Qi Lin, Jiayu Chen, Xiangfeng Li, Yiqiao Sun, Xiaodong Xu
Summary: Urban building energy model is a focus of recent research, with challenges like data requirements and inter-building effects. Five data-driven models were tested on various scales, with different algorithms and dataset sizes influencing energy prediction results. Integration of building networks and morphology improved prediction accuracy, showing potential for reducing data requirements in urban energy models.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2021)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Dimitris Tsirantonakis, Nektarios Chrysoulakis
Summary: The sustainable development of cities is crucial for the well-being and safety of urban populations, and evaluating the impact of urban planning interventions is important. In this study, Earth Observation data was used to systematically assess the effect of a suburban park development on urban surface energy balance, and it was found that the planned intervention contributed to the development of the urban heat island.
Article
Engineering, Environmental
Wei Chen, Yuyu Zhou, Yanhua Xie, Gang Chen, Ke Jack Ding, Dan Li
Summary: The study developed a bottom-up city building heat emission model to investigate temporal variations of building anthropogenic heat in all buildings in Boston.
RESOURCES CONSERVATION AND RECYCLING
(2022)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Patricia Borges, Oriol Travesset-Baro, Anna Pages-Ramon
Summary: The development of building archetypes has been a major focus in research for the past decades, and it is considered a challenge and a source of inaccuracies in Urban Buildings Energy Models (UBEM). This paper presents a hybrid approach to identify representative building archetypes, combining deterministic and data-driven clustering methods, and the results show that both approaches complement each other.
BUILDING AND ENVIRONMENT
(2022)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Tianzhen Hong, Yujie Xu, Kaiyu Sun, Wanni Zhang, Xuan Luo, Barry Hooper
Summary: This study utilized 10-year measured hourly weather data from 27 sites in San Francisco to analyze urban microclimate patterns and the urban heat island effect. The results showed significant impacts on building performance and climate resilience, with up to 11 degrees C temperature difference between coastal and downtown areas during a heatwave. The study also highlighted the importance of considering microclimate variations in urban energy planning and building standards.
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Juejun Ge, Yupeng Wang, Dian Zhou, Zhaolin Gu, Xiangzhao Meng
Summary: This study observed the vertical meteorological pattern (VMP) in urban areas of Xi'an, China, and predicted the impacts of VMP on the heating and cooling energy demands of different urban blocks using a building energy simulation model. The results showed that VMP significantly affected the energy demands of buildings and the relationship between urban block form and energy demand.
BUILDING AND ENVIRONMENT
(2023)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Mariana Liebman-Pelaez, Johnathan Kongoletos, Leslie K. Norford, Christoph Reinhart
Summary: Plant factories have emerged in urban areas to increase local food production, create job opportunities, and provide environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional agriculture. Container farms, a type of plant factory system, use artificial lighting and hydroponic farming practices to support crop production in urban settings regardless of climate conditions. By validating an EnergyPlus model of a hydroponic container farm in Boston, stakeholders can reliably predict energy usage and optimize the environmental performance of container farms.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2021)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Samiran Khorat, Debashish Das, Rupali Khatun, Sk Mohammad Aziz, Prashant Anand, Ansar Khan, Mattheos Santamouris, Dev Niyogi
Summary: Cool roofs can effectively mitigate heatwave-induced excess heat and enhance thermal comfort in urban areas. Implementing cool roofs can significantly improve urban meteorology and thermal comfort, reducing energy flux and heat stress.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2024)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Qi Li, Jiayu Chen, Xiaowei Luo
Summary: This study focuses on the vertical wind conditions as a main external factor that limits the energy assessment of high-rise buildings in urban areas. Traditional tools for energy assessment of buildings use a universal vertical wind profile estimation, without taking into account the unique wind speed in each direction induced by the various shapes and configurations of buildings in cities. To address this limitation, the study developed an omnidirectional urban vertical wind speed estimation method using direction-dependent building morphologies and machine learning algorithms.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2024)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Xiaojun Luo, Lamine Mahdjoubi
Summary: This paper presents an integrated blockchain and machine learning-based energy management framework for multiple forms of energy allocation and transmission among multiple domestic buildings. Machine learning is used to predict energy generation and consumption patterns, and the proposed framework establishes optimal and automated energy allocation through peer-to-peer energy transactions. The approach contributes to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and enhances environmental sustainability.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2024)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Ying Yu, Yuanwei Xiao, Jinshuai Chou, Xingyu Wang, Liu Yang
Summary: This study proposes a dual-layer optimization design method to maximize the energy sharing potential, enhance collaborative benefits, and reduce the storage capacity of building clusters. Case studies show that the proposed design significantly improves the performance of building clusters, reduces energy storage capacity, and shortens the payback period.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2024)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Felix Langner, Weimin Wang, Moritz Frahm, Veit Hagenmeyer
Summary: This paper compares two main approaches to consider uncertainties in model predictive control (MPC) for buildings: robust and stochastic MPC. The results show that compared to a deterministic MPC, the robust MPC increases the electricity cost while providing complete temperature constraint satisfaction, while the stochastic MPC slightly increases the electricity cost but fulfills the thermal comfort requirements.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2024)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Somil Yadav, Caroline Hachem-Vermette
Summary: This study proposes a mathematical model to evaluate the performance of a Double Skin Facade (DSF) system and its impact on indoor conditions. The model considers various design parameters and analyzes their effects on the system's electrical output and room temperature.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2024)
Article
Construction & Building Technology
Ruijun Chen, Holly Samuelson, Yukai Zou, Xianghan Zheng, Yifan Cao
Summary: This research introduces an innovative resilient design framework that optimizes building performance by considering a holistic life cycle perspective and accounting for climate projection uncertainties. The study finds that future climate scenarios significantly impact building life cycle performance, with wall U-value, windows U-value, and wall density being major factors. By using ensemble learning and optimization algorithms, predictions for carbon emissions, cost, and indoor discomfort hours can be made, and the best resilient design scheme can be selected. Applying this framework leads to significant improvements in building life cycle performance.
ENERGY AND BUILDINGS
(2024)