Reducing building energy consumption is a significant challenge and is one of the most important research areas worldwide. Insulation will help to keep the building’s desired temperature by reducing the heat flow. Additionally, proper insulation can provide an extended period of comfort, leading to reduced building energy requirements. Encapsulated air is the major aspect of most thermal insulation materials. Low thermal conductivity is a good characteristic of thermal insulation materials. Aerogel has low thermal conductivity, so it is suitable for glazing and insulation purposes. This research paper investigates the effectiveness of aerogel as an insulation material in buildings by incorporating a translucent aerogel-glazing system in the window and aerogel insulation in the wall of a building. Experimental investigation of a 10 mm thick aerogel blanket surrounded box was conducted to assess its performance. Additionally, a CFD simulation was conducted, and the results of temperature degradation for the wall showed good agreement with experimental results. Additionally, the CFD simulation of temperature decay was compared between the aerogel-glazed window and argon-glazed window. It was found that the aerogel-glazed window has slower temperature decay compared to the argon-glazed window. The results showed that integrating aerogel in the glazing system and wall insulation in a building has the potential to reduce the building’s energy consumption. Moreover, a numeric simulation was conducted, and showed that the building’s annual energy consumption is reduced by 6% with the use of aerogel insulation compared to fiberglass.

Industrial manufacturing approaches are associated with processing materials that consume a significant amount of thermal energy, termed as industrial process heat. Industrial sectors consume a substantial amount of energy for process heating over a wide range of temperatures (up to 400 °C) from agriculture, HVAC to power plants. However, the intensive industrial application of fossil fuels causes unfavorable environmental effects that cannot be ignored. To address this issue, green energy sources have manifested their potential as economical and pollution-free energy sources. Nevertheless, the adoption of solar industrial process heating systems is still limited due to a lack of knowledge in the design/installation aspects, reluctance to experience the technical/infrastructural changes, low price of fossil fuels, and lack of relative incentives. For successful solar process heat integration in industries, a proper understanding of the associated design factors is essential. This paper comprehensively reviews the integration strategies of solar industrial process heating systems, appraisal of the integration points, different aspects of solar collectors, installed thermal power, and thermal storage volume covering case studies, reports and reviews. The integration aspects of solar process heat, findings, and obstacles of several projects from the literature are also highlighted. Finally, the integration locations of SHIP systems are compared for different industrial sectors to find out the most used integration point for a certain sector and operation. It was found that for the food, beverage, and agriculture sector, 51% of solar process heat integration occurs at the supply level and 27.3% at the process-level.

Modeling of objects and environment for simulation in the context of commercial vehicles can be obtained by measuring manually and using those data to create the model in CAD software. This modeling method is time-consuming against the state-of-the-art modeling method using triangulation which is faster and easy to implement. There exist several methods for the generation of triangle meshes. However, the model produced by these approaches is not editable for various simulation scenarios. Therefore, in this paper, a new approach by using the triangulation method is developed which can be used as an element for Vrep simulation that is capable to overcome the challenges (editable and faster) presented by the previous approaches. In this paper, different mesh reconstruction algorithms such as Poisson Surface Reconstruction and Ball pivoting algorithm were applied and their output meshes were assessed. The Poisson surface reconstruction algorithm proved to be quite robust against the Ball pivoting algorithm and is therefore described step by step. Additionally, object separation techniques were applied for grouping different parts. The output meshes using the triangulation method using from both state-of-the-art and the novel approach presented in this paper are compared in terms of size and dimensional accuracy. A pillar height, an entrance area, and road width were measured and the dimensional accuracy was found to be 98.64% for both approaches where the proposed approach has the benefit of being editable.