The Road to Developing Economically Feasible Plans for Green, Comfortable and Energy Efficient Buildings

Abstract

Owing to the current challenges in energy and environmental crises, improving buildings, as one of the biggest concerns and contributors to these issues, is increasingly receiving attention from the world. Due to a variety of choices and situations for improving buildings, it is important to review the building performance optimization studies to find the proper solution. In this paper, these studies are reviewed by analyzing all the different key parameters involved in the optimization process, including the considered decision variables, objective functions, constraints, and case studies, along with the software programs and optimization algorithms employed. As the core literature, 44 investigations recently published are considered and compared. The current investigation provides sufficient information for all the experts in the building sector, such as architects and mechanical engineers. It is noticed that EnergyPlus and MATLAB have been employed more than other software for building simulation and optimization, respectively. In addition, among the nine different aspects that have been optimized in the literature, energy consumption, thermal comfort, and economic benefits are the first, second, and third most optimized, having shares of 38.6%, 22.7%, and 17%, respectively.

Thermophysics Analysis of Office Buildings with a Temperature–Humidity Coupling Strategy Under Hot-Arid Climatic Conditions

“…With today's needs for energy savings and control of the building's environmental impacts [1,2], some doubts arise about the definition of thermal comfort and how to create and maintain comfort conditions as they are dependent on geographical location of building [3], as such person-to-person perceptions changes, and the type of activities performed. In situ studies of thermal comfort have revealed an overestimation of the level of perceived discomfort in reality compared to that predicted by regional building standards, especially in buildings that are air-conditioned during hot periods [4].…”

“…The development of thermal comfort techniques has played a paramount role to enlighten comfort parameters with various renewable energy technologies [17][18][19]. This epoch is characterized by the progress and enhancement of thermal machines [2]. It is imperative to mention that thermal comfort is also dependent on stress-free satisfaction of energy consumption, as such low-energy power generation [20,21] with PV integrated solar thermal systems [22][23][24], advanced smart building wall insulation technologies and smart windows [25,26] are growing in remote regions of the countries, where access to electric grid [27] is still under-development, and in fact a successful notion of smart cities with advanced insulation technologies where individual buildings could be self-energy reliant.…”

“…Based on a bibliographical study on thermal comfort and existing methods, we conducted a numerical study in situ in a room of office building to explore adaptive comfort more closely and characterize the interaction between comfort quantities. By using Aripak software and during the summer season, Mousavi Motlagh et al [2] studied an air-conditioned class that was affected by two factors: cold jet and the buoyancy force of the heat source. Sempey et al [31] made a rapid simulation of the temperature distribution in conditioned rooms.…”

Development of a Mosque Design for a Hot, Dry Climate Based on a Holistic Bioclimatic Vision

“…Martinez, Duarte [17] speaks about improving the environmental quality in educational buildings, Tsala and Koronaki [18] talk about strategies of saving energy in a campus building in Athene, while Erebor, Ibem [19] takes into account the application on the energy efficiency in office buildings. Mousavi Motlagh, Sohani [20] present, in a valuable review of research, a wide review on economically feasible plans for green, comfortable, and energy-efficient buildings, touching directly on the principals of the bioclimatic architecture, where the author collects several recent works on the bounding optimization field treating several building types as well as community centers, tourist center, rest areas, university, museums, and much more. Furthermore, based on a strong review, the author divided the building optimization process into two main categories: the single-objective optimization (SOO) and multi-objective optimization (MOO).…”

Acquiring the Foremost Window Allocation Strategy to Achieve the Best Trade-Off among Energy, Environmental, and Comfort Criteria in a Building

“…position, external shading, and glazing properties Al-Saggaf et al [ In a building, several aspects are involved, and researchers investigate a building from different perspectives. Each of these aspects can be then evaluated by some quantitative indicators that have been considered as the objective functions in the literature [21]. In order to investigate these objectives in a building, depending on the considered objectives, researchers usually use a variety of building simulation software programs, such as EnegyPlus (funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)), DesignBuilder (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK), Radiance (developed by Greg Ward, Berkeley, CA, USA) etc.…”