The enormous building energy consumption in Shanghai necessitates the identification of standard buildings to offer guidance for the adequate design of retrofitting strategies in order to promote a sustainable built and architectural environment. In this regard, this study develops a methodological approach to establish prototypical buildings using performance index system (PIS) founded on an on-site survey. Emphasis is focused on low-rise office buildings in Shanghai. A total of 10 office parks containing 136 single low-rise office buildings in Min Hang District were systemically selected for survey and data collection. The proposed PIS includes building orientation, number of floors, window/wall ratio, heat and cold source type, plan form, and construction year. Using cluster and correlation analysis, the surveyed buildings are classified based on the impact of each PIS on the annual building energy use intensity. Based on this approach, the most influencing indexes are construction year, the number of floors, window-wall ratio and building orientation. This result refines the surveyed building samples to four prototypical buildings as representative standards for low-rise office buildings. Subsequently, typical buildings representing each of the prototypical buildings were defined. The stipulated approach provides a systematic framework for building classification, characteristic-based evaluation of building energy performance and identification of key performance index for building retrofit purposes.

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Amine functionalized layered double hydroxide (LDHs) adsorbents prepared using three different routes: co-precipitation, sono-chemical and ultrasonic-assisted high pressure hydrothermal. The prepared adsorbent samples were characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), Scanning electron microscope-Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX), Temperature Programmed Desorption (TPD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), and Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), respectively. The performance of the prepared adsorbents was tested in a controlled thermal-swing adsorption process to measure its adsorption capacity, regeneration and cyclic efficiencies subsequently. The characterisation results were compared with those obtained using the conventional preparation routes but taking into account of the impact of sonochemical and hydrothermal pre-treatment on textural properties, adsorption capacity, regeneration and cyclic efficiencies. Textural results depicts a surge in surface area of the adsorbent synthesised by hydrothermal route (311m/g) from 25 to 171m/g for conventional and ultrasonic routes respectively. Additionally, it has been revealed from the present study that adsorbents prepared using ultrasonic-assisted hydrothermal route exhibit a better CO uptake capacity than that prepared using sonochemical and conventional routes. Thus, the ultrasonic-assisted hydrothermal treatment can effectively promote the adsorption capacity of the adsorbent. This is probably due to the decrease of moderate (M-O) and weak (OH groups) basic sites with subsequent surge in the number of strong basic sites (O) resulting from the hydrothermal process. Moreover, the cyclic adsorption efficiency of the ultrasonic mediated process was found to be 76% compared with 60% for conventional and 53% for hydrothermal routes, respectively. According to the kinetic model analysis, adsorption mechanism is mostly dominated by physisorption before amine modification and by chemisorption after the modification process.

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