Environmental Design and New Energy Application in Sustainable Building

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in targeting energy efficiency/energy flexibility as a key support for carbon mitigation/reduction, limiting energy use, improving buildings’ energy performance, and increasing indoor built thermal comfort as well as health level for achieving sustainable buildings. The pursuit of sustainable buildings could be closely linked to indoor/outdoor environmental design and new/renewable energy sources/systems, but there is likely a very complex and inter-connected relationship between them, which requires new advances in simulation tools, system innovation, data analysis, and optimization with controls. Therefore, there are many research gaps in the above-mentioned aspects, in terms of simulation tools with faster speed and more powerful functions, system innovation with better usage of renewables from different sources, data analysis of sustainable building systems with higher efficiency and multiple connections to other applications, and system optimization/control resulting in better overall performance.

This Special Issue collects research articles and critical reviews containing scientific and technical information on new advances and contributions in sustainable buildings through innovative environmental design methods or new energy applications. Both qualitative and quantitative studies, as well as empirical and theoretical contributions, are welcomed.

The primary areas of interest of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

1. New simulation methods or tools for building energy systems and building environment design;
2. Co-simulation models or methods from different system scales or different objectives;
3. Applications of renewables like solar energy and geothermal energy to buildings;
4. Data collection, monitoring, or data analysis for sustainable buildings;
5. New solutions for special types of buildings like data center, transportation buildings, underground buildings, etc.;
6. Applications of data-driven and AI methods in promotion of building energy performance;
7. New advances in building system and energy system control;
8. Building energy system optimization with new methods, strategies, tools, or applications.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Yongqiang Luo
Dr. Zhiyong Tian
Guest Editors

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 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability 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 2400 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.

• building environment
• renewable energy systems
• building simulation
• optimization and control
• energy data analysis