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Building Physics: Towards Low-Carbon and Human Comfort
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Building Physics: Towards Low-Carbon and Human Comfort

A Special Issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309) belonging to the section "Building Energy, Physics, Environment, and Systems".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2027 | Viewed by 866

Editor

Dr. Xiangli Li

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Institute of Building Environment and Facility Engineering, School of Civil Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, China
Interests: thermal comfort analysis; radiative-convective heat transfer; district heating systems; thermo-hydraulic analysis of pipeline networks; phase-change thermal energy storage; shallow ground-coupled heat pump technology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Building physics provides the fundamental basis for understanding energy transfer, fluid flow, and thermal interactions in buildings, directly influencing energy efficiency, carbon emissions, and indoor environmental quality. As buildings move toward low-carbon and human-centered development, increasing system complexity and tighter performance requirements pose new challenges for both design and operation. In particular, the performance and reliability of building energy systems have become critical to achieving sustainable and resilient buildings. Recent advances in building energy modeling, sensing technologies, intelligent control, and data-driven analysis have significantly enhanced our ability to evaluate and optimize building performance. At the same time, faults and leakages in heating and cooling pipelines within buildings may cause hidden energy losses and comfort degradation if not properly identified. These challenges highlight the need for integrated, physics-based, and system-oriented research approaches.

This Special Issue, entitled “Building Physics: Towards Low-Carbon and Human Comfort,” aims to gather recent scientific advances and engineering practices that improve building energy performance, system reliability, and occupant comfort through theoretical, numerical, experimental, and field-based studies.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Building physics-based modeling and analysis;
  • Low-carbon building design and performance optimization;
  • Thermal comfort and indoor environmental quality;
  • Energy-efficient HVAC systems and advanced control strategies;
  • Building energy flexibility and demand-side management;
  • Smart sensing, monitoring, and data-driven approaches;
  • Fault diagnosis and integrity monitoring of heating and cooling systems in buildings.

Dr. Xiangli Li
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • building physics
  • low-carbon buildings
  • thermal comfort
  • indoor environmental quality
  • building energy systems
  • energy-efficient HVAC
  • human-centered building design
  • fault diagnosis and integrity monitoring of heating pipeline

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

23 pages, 4828 KB  
Article
A Compact and Robust Framework for Multi-Condition Transient Pressure-Wave-Based Leakage Identification in District Heating Networks
by Chang Chang, Xiangli Li, Xin Jia and Lin Duanmu
Buildings 2026, 16(8), 1586; https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16081586 - 17 Apr 2026
Viewed by 478
Abstract
Leakage identification in district heating networks is challenging because leakage-induced transient pressure waves often overlap with pressure disturbances triggered by routine operations such as valve regulation, pump speed variation, and emergency shut-off. In addition, the scarcity of high-quality labeled leakage samples limits the [...] Read more.
Leakage identification in district heating networks is challenging because leakage-induced transient pressure waves often overlap with pressure disturbances triggered by routine operations such as valve regulation, pump speed variation, and emergency shut-off. In addition, the scarcity of high-quality labeled leakage samples limits the robustness of data-driven models under small-sample conditions. To address these issues, this study proposes a compact and moderately interpretable framework for multi-condition identification from transient pressure-wave signals, integrating signal preprocessing, handcrafted statistical feature extraction, multiclass ReliefF-based feature selection, and class-wise generative adversarial network augmentation in the selected feature space. A dataset containing four representative conditions, namely leakage, valve regulation, pump speed regulation, and emergency valve shut-off, was constructed using an integrated indoor district heating network testbed. After Hampel-based spike suppression and zero-phase Butterworth band-pass filtering within 0.5 to 300 Hz, time- and frequency-domain statistical features were extracted, and a compact subset was selected by multiclass ReliefF. A class-wise generative adversarial network was then used to augment the training set in feature space, while all evaluations were performed strictly on real samples. The results show that feature-space augmentation improves robustness and generalization under operational disturbances and noise. Using random forest as the representative classifier, Accuracy and Macro-F1 increased from 0.960 to 0.985, while leakage recall improved from 0.920 to 0.980. Further comparisons confirmed that the ReliefF-selected subset outperformed representative alternatives such as LASSO and mRMR. Overall, the proposed framework provides an effective solution for distinguishing leakage events from operational disturbances and offers practical support for online monitoring and intelligent operation of district heating networks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Building Physics: Towards Low-Carbon and Human Comfort)
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