• Energy Research

Buildings are expected to provide healthy and comfortable indoor environmental conditions for their users. Such conditions have diverse dimensions, including thermal, visual, air quality, auditory, and olfactory aspects. Indoor environmental quality standards, guidelines, and codes typically inform professionals in the building design and operation phase in view of procedural, contractual, and legal boundary conditions. Given this critical role of standards, it seems significant to examine the applicability and scientific validity on a regular basis. In this context, the present paper focuses on the standard-based definition of indoor air quality (IAQ) indicators and their respective values. Hence, the main aim of this effort is to study several common national and international IAQ standards in view of the scope to which they include direct or indirect evidence for the validity and applicability of their mandates and requirements. To this end, selected IAQ standards were assessed via a structured schema that includes not only basic information, quality indicators, and suggested and recommended value ranges, but also any reference to scientific studies. The findings of this effort identify certain issues with the transparency of the chain of evidence from the results of technical literature and standard-based IAQ recommendations. Moreover, recommendations are made for the development of future transparent and evidence-based IAQ standards and guidelines.

Hot and dry climate and air pollution is a growing problem in urban areas, and this can have an adverse impact on life and health of urban residents. One of the ways to protect people from this hazard is the use of urban green or street greenery. However, its implementation can be problematic in highly urbanized areas. This paper presents a concept of the green structure (GS), designed, and is still being developed, by Adam Kalinowski where cooling efficiency is based on the synergy of shade and evapotranspiration. The GS that could be used as street furniture, small architecture form or a public utility structure intended to protect people and objects from an adverse urban environment, at the same time providing pleasant and healthy microclimate inside. The pilot project-the first application of the GS in the urban environment-is presented and the results of short-term measurements of temperature and humidity are provided and analyzed. Moreover, a simple dynamic simulation of the GS performance in courtyards has been conducted. The obtained results show the decrease of the perceived temperature within this structure. Depending on climate type, an average potential reduction of Universal Thermal Comfort Index (UTCI) and mean radiant temperature (Tmrt), caused by the GS in a courtyard case study, is 5–8 °C and 17–29 °C, respectively. Performed simulation also confirms that TRNSYS software is an appropriate tool for simple outdoor microclimate analysis. Further research to develop this concept, increase its performance and customize it for different applications are proposed.

Abstract Current predictions of climate change impacts rely on conservative assumptions about a lack of adaptation, projecting significantly increased heatwave mortality. However, long-term studies have shown a decline in actual heatwave deaths, raising questions about the underlying mechanisms. We combined Eurostat weekly mortality data (baseline extracted via Seasonal-Trend decomposition by Loess and smoothed through Principal Component Analysis dimension reduction and reconstruction) with economic indicators, Copernicus temperature data since 1950, and ENTSO-E electricity demand data. Panel regression analyzed mortality patterns during weeks with daily temperatures exceeding 22 °C for 2000–2022. During the analyzed period, Europe outpaced climate change, with the capacity to tolerate an additional 1 °C rise every 17.9 years [95% CI 15.3–22.7]. Extending the temperature indicators beyond the prior 3 years did not enhance predictive accuracy, suggesting swift adaptations and historical climate lacked any predictive value. Additionally, increasing economic output, likely driven by infrastructural improvements, especially greater affordability of air conditioning, enabled tolerating each additional 1 °C due to a per capita GDP increase of 19.7 thousand euros [95% CI 14.6–30.3]. Consistently, the increase in cooling energy demand was the strongest in eastern Europe. The findings shed light on the mechanisms driving the observed reduction in heatwave mortality despite the warming climate trend, offering a more plausible basis for extrapolation than assuming a lack of adaptation. The model emphasizes the role of long term economic growth and addressing energy poverty.

This study investigates human-building interaction in office spaces across multiple countries including Brazil, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, the United States, and Taiwan. We analyze social-psychological, contextual, and demographic factors to explain cross-country differences in adaptive thermal actions (i.e. cooling and heating behaviors) and conformity to the norms of sharing indoor environmental control features, an indicator of energy consumption. Specifically, personal adjustments such as putting on extra clothes are generally preferred over technological solutions such as adjusting thermostats in reaction to thermal discomfort. Social-psychological factors including attitudes, perceived behavioral control, injunctive norms, and perceived impact of indoor environmental quality on work productivity influence occupants’ intention to conform to the norms of sharing environmental control features. Lastly, accessibility to environmental control features, office type, gender, and age are also important factors. These findings demonstrate the roles of social-psychological and certain contextual factors in occupants’ interactions with building design as well as their behavior of sharing environmental control features, both of which significantly influence building energy consumption, and thus, broader decarbonization.

Energy is consumed in buildings through the use of various types of energy systems, which are controlled by the occupants via provided interfaces. The quality of this control should be verified to improve the efficiency of the systems and for the comfort of the occupants. In the case of residential buildings, due to privacy reasons, it is problematic to directly monitor human–building interactions using sensors installed in dwellings. However, data from increasingly common smart meters are easily available. In this paper, the potential use of data from heat meters is explored for the analysis of occupant interactions with space-heating (SH) systems. A pilot study is conducted based on a one-year set of daily data from 101 dwellings. First, the identification of an indoor temperature and a strategy for thermostatic radiator valve (TRV) adjustments for all the investigated dwellings is presented. Second, the performed analysis suggests that 96% of the households did not use the automatic adjustment function of the TRVs since adjustments using the on–off mode were the most common, which could be empirical evidence for Kempton’s theory on mental models of home heating controls. The reasons for this could be the weakness of the TRV as an SH interface and the technical specificity of the analyzed SH (its supply temperature). The preliminary investigation confirms the potential of the proposed methodology, but further research is needed.

AbstractThis paper introduces a database of 34 field-measured building occupant behavior datasets collected from 15 countries and 39 institutions across 10 climatic zones covering various building types in both commercial and residential sectors. This is a comprehensive global database about building occupant behavior. The database includes occupancy patterns (i.e., presence and people count) and occupant behaviors (i.e., interactions with devices, equipment, and technical systems in buildings). Brick schema models were developed to represent sensor and room metadata information. The database is publicly available, and a website was created for the public to access, query, and download specific datasets or the whole database interactively. The database can help to advance the knowledge and understanding of realistic occupancy patterns and human-building interactions with building systems (e.g., light switching, set-point changes on thermostats, fans on/off, etc.) and envelopes (e.g., window opening/closing). With these more realistic inputs of occupants’ schedules and their interactions with buildings and systems, building designers, energy modelers, and consultants can improve the accuracy of building energy simulation and building load forecasting.