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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sustainability and Applications".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 April 2022.
Special Issue Editors
Interests: indoor environmental quality in classrooms and offices; thermal comfort; acoustics of worship places; environmental noise analysis; thermal and acoustical properties of material; circular economy; waste material; sustainable building component; energy saving; lighting
Interests: thermal, optical, and acoustic properties of opaque and transparent building materials; transparent insulating materials (TIMs); circular economy; waste material; life cycle assessment; indoor environmental quality; heat transfer; thermal and lighting comfort; building energy simulation; acoustic quality of rooms; environmental noise analysis; renewable energy
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Indoor environmental quality is a very important challenge that can impact health and wellbeing as well as communication aspects, related to a good intelligibility of the acoustic message and visual and thermal comfort. It has been widely demonstrated that a comfortable environment enhances productivity for workers and students. Globally, it is seen that the potential health and productivity benefits remain to be implicated in the total cost of design. At present, building facility managers are showing an interest by ameliorating indoor air, and new designs are being used to build comprehensive databases of occupant perceptions.
In this context, a number of key issues need to be taken into account: thermo-hygrometric indoor conditions, sound generation and propagation, occupants’ perception, and quality of indoor air and lighting. These topics can also be approached by studying new building design and architecture.
This Special Issue aims to collect papers on indoor comfort and health. Both reviews and application-specific research papers are welcome. Review papers should present comprehensive reference information and the state-of-the-art in the subjects considered. Information on new building service components or lightening devices available on the market and/or recently developed in the literature would be welcome.
Papers selected for this Special Issue will be subject to a rigorous peer review procedure with the aim of rapid and wide dissemination of research results, developments, and applications.
Prof. Dr. Paola Ricciardi
Dr. Elisa Belloni
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 papers will be 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 1900 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
- Indoor environmental quality
- Sustainable architecture
- Indoor thermal comfort
- Acoustic comfort
- Visual comfort
- Air quality
- Building performance
- Energy savings
- Dynamic simulations
- Global and local comfort index
Planned Papers
The below list represents only planned manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts have not been received by the Editorial Office yet. Papers submitted to MDPI journals are subject to peer-review.
Title: Development of a Decisional Procedure Based on Fuzzy Logic for the Energy Retrofitting of Buildings
Authors: L. Barelli; E. Belloni; G. Bidini; C. Buratti; E.M. Pinchi
Affiliation: Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, Via G. Duranti 93, Perugia 06125, Italy
Abstract: Abstract:
The paper concerns the development of an automatic tool, based on Fuzzy Logic, able to identify proper solutions for energy retrofitting of existing buildings. Considering winter heating, opaque and glazing surfaces are considered in order to reduce building heat dispersions. Starting from energy diagnosis, it is possible to formulate retrofitting proposals and to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention, considering several aspects (energy savings, costs, intervention typology). The innovation of this work is represented by the application of a fuzzy logic expert system to get an indication about proper interventions for building energy retrofitting, providing as inputs only few parameters, with a strong reduction in time and effort with respect to software tools and methodologies currently applied by experts.
Energy requirements for winter heating before and after particular interventions were evaluated for a consistent set of buildings, in order to produce the required knowledge base for the tool development. Identified appropriate inputs and outputs, their domains of discretization, the membership functions associated to each fuzzy set, and the linguistic rules were deduced on the basis of the knowledge so determined. Therefore, the system was successfully validated with reference to further buildings characterized by different design and architecture features, showing a good agreement with the interventions opportunity evaluated.
Keywords:
building design and architecture; energy retrofitting; energy efficiency in buildings; energy diagnosis; fuzzy logic