Green buildings are considered a quick and effective approach to protect the environment by slowing down the consumption rate of primary energy resources and by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In Europe, appraisals of properties should take into consideration this new feature of buildings by implementing data from Energy Performance Certificates (EPC) into real estate assessment. With this respect, a methodology is proposed and analyzed to be considered in the sales comparison real estate valuation process. The originality of the methodology consists of considering the expected costs of the so-called wasted/saved energy as a proxy for depreciations/appreciations of the value of the building due to the obsolete/better energy efficiency. Wasted/saved energy is considered to be the difference between the energy demand of a reference building and the energy demand of the subject property.

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This paper aims to renew interest on mixed thermal convection research and to emphasize three issues that arise from the present analysis: (i) a clear definition of the reference temperature in the Boussinesq approximation; (ii) a practical delimitation of the three convective modes, which are the forced convection (FC), mixed convection (MC) and natural (or free) convection (NC); (iii) and, finally, a uniform description of the set FC/MC/NC in the similarity framework. The planar case, for which analytical solutions are available, allows a detailed illustration of the answers here advanced to the above issues.

The present work consists of a series of studies with regard to the structure and charge transport in solid polymer electrolytes (SPE) prepared using various new bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl)imide (TFSI)-based dianionic dilithium salts in crosslinked low-molecular-weight poly(ethylene glycol). Some of the thermal properties (glass transition temperature, differential molar heat capacity) and ionic conductivities were determined for both diluted (EO/Li = 30:1) and concentrated (EO/Li = 10:1) SPEs. Trends in ionic conductivity of the new SPEs with respect to anion structure revealed that while for the dilute electrolytes ionic conductivity is generally rising with increased length of the perfluoroalkylene linking group in the dianions, for the concentrated electrolytes the trend is reversed with respect to dianion length. This behavior could be the result of a combination of two factors: on one hand a decrease in dianion basicity that results in diminished ion pairing and an enhancement in the number of charge carriers with increasing fluorine anion content, thereby increasing ionic conductivity while on the other hand the increasing anion size and concentration produce an increase in the friction/entanglements of the polymeric segments which lowers even more the reduced segmental motion of the crosslinked polymer and decrease the dianion contribution to the overall ionic conductivity. DFT modeling of the same TFSI-based dianionic dilithium salts reveals that the reason for the trend observed is due to the variation in ion dissociation enthalpy, derived from minimum-energy structures, with respect to perfluoroalkylene chain length.

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