Search Results (4,266)

Parking infrastructure is an important yet often inconsistently treated element in whole-life carbon footprint assessments and broader building sustainability evaluation. With the revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) introducing mandatory global warming potential (GWP) reporting, the influence of methodological choices on GWP results requires a clearer understanding. This study examines six multi-apartment residential (MAR) projects featuring four distinct parking typologies to quantify how parking infrastructure affects calculated GWP outcomes. Using EN 15804-compliant life cycle assessment (LCA) data, we evaluate four methodological approaches for including parking infrastructure in GWP calculations and the approach mandated by the delegated act supplementing the EPBD (DA-EPBD). The results show that parking infrastructure can account for up to 39% of embodied and up to 25% of whole life cycle emissions. Methodological approaches significantly influenced the GWP results, leading to differences of up to 32% in sample median values. An inconsistency in the DA-EPBD approach is identified, resulting in better GWP performance for projects including large-area attached parking infrastructure, while leading to higher GWP values for projects with detached parking. The findings highlight the sensitivity of GWP outcomes to methodological assumptions regarding parking infrastructure and underscore the need for clear national GWP calculation rules when integrating DA-EPBD requirements. Full article

This paper presents an Internet of Things-oriented intelligent supervisory system and high-level control for a small wind turbine powering a residential building. The proposed approach integrates wind generation, battery storage, grid interaction, technical condition analysis, and initial operating mode selection within a single cyber–physical framework. A nonlinear discrete–time hybrid mathematical model was developed for the study, describing the interdependent operating processes of the turbine, storage, and power converter, along with a control algorithm that accounts for constraint flows. A series of experiments are presented for steady-state and dynamic operating scenarios, including wind-speed variations, evening energy shortages, stochastic disturbances, and a developing converter unit fault. As a result, the proposed Internet of Things-oriented supervisory algorithm ensures more efficient utilization of the available wind resource, reduced grid-import dependency, improved battery reserve preservation, and lower thermal loading of the power electronics. Under developing fault conditions and stochastic operating disturbances, the proposed framework maintains more stable residential energy-management behavior and improved operational robustness. The obtained results confirm the potential of the proposed control design for autonomous and semi-autonomous low-power wind energy systems for residential and distributed use. Full article

Sentry box buildings present excessive energy consumption and poor thermal comfort due to the lightweight envelope. Therefore, a framework integrating passive design with multi-objective optimization and cascading active airflow mode optimization for sentry box buildings was developed in the study. First, a parametric model for the prototype of sentry box buildings in the cold zone of China was developed. The global sensitivity analysis based on the treed Gaussian process was employed to select key design variables. Furthermore, backpropagation neural network prediction models for the UDI, PPD, and EUI of sentry box buildings were developed based on the dataset, which was generated via Latin hypercube sampling and building performance simulation in Grasshopper. Subsequently, the NSGA-II algorithm was selected for multi-objective optimization, combined with entropy-weighted TOPSIS analysis, to determine the optimal values of the design variables for sentry box buildings. Finally, the optimal airflow mode and velocity of sentry box buildings for summer and winter were selected through cascaded CFD simulations. The results indicate that the window-to-wall ratio is the most influential design variable across the optimization objectives of sentry box buildings. The prediction models achieve high accuracy, with the lowest coefficient of determination R of 0.994 and the highest mean squared error of 0.001. The optimized design improved performance across all objectives compared to the prototype of sentry box buildings, with UDI increasing by 77.433%, and PPD and EUI decreasing by 18.282% and 28.668%, respectively. Interestingly, the sentry box buildings should adopt a horizontal attached airflow mode at 1.5 m/s in summer and a vertical attached airflow mode at 1.8 m/s in winter. In summary, a decision-support tool was introduced in the study for the early design stage to assist in selecting optimal design solutions for the sentry box buildings. Full article

The building sector is a critical component of the European Union’s strategy to achieve climate neutrality, as it accounts for 30–40% of total energy consumption and significant greenhouse gas emissions. While sustainability certification systems like BREEAM, LEED, DGNB, and HQE have established frameworks for environmental assessment, their widespread adoption in the residential sector faces challenges related to complexity and technical barriers. This paper provides a state-of-the-art literature review on streamlining sustainability certification for residential buildings in the EU. It examines the transition from established private schemes to harmonised frameworks such as Level(s), alongside the integration of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The review identifies key obstacles, including data interoperability issues, the need for automated quantity extraction, and the lack of technical expertise among stakeholders. Findings suggest that streamlining requires advancing semantic data models and digital twins to enable real-time performance monitoring and automated compliance checking. Furthermore, the alignment of national building codes with the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the European Green Deal is essential for fostering a more cohesive certification landscape. The study concludes by outlining pathways for reducing the administrative and technical burden of certification to support the EU’s decarbonisation and renovation goals. Full article

Controlling pollutant dispersion in high-rise buildings is crucial for public health. Vertical pollutant diffusion in stairwells occurs under thermal and wind effects. However, most existing studies rely on idealized boundary conditions. To address this, this study uses field-measured wall temperatures and a window wind velocity as boundary conditions for transient CFD simulations. We investigate the vertical diffusion characteristics of buoyant (CH₄) and dense (CO₂) pollutants under thermal pressure, window velocity, and wind–thermal coupling in a high-rise residential building in Taiyuan. Results show an asymmetric “fast-up, slow-down” diffusion under thermal pressure, a relatively symmetric profile under window velocity, and a hybrid pattern under coupling where the upper region is wind-dominated and the lower region resembles thermal-driven diffusion. Wind–thermal coupling most significantly enhances upward diffusion. Using the arrival time of CH₄ at the 28th floor (about 15 m above the source floor) as the benchmark, the diffusion rate under coupling is about 200% faster than under thermal pressure alone, and about 50% faster than under the window-velocity condition alone. Differences in density lead to variations in dispersion, with CH₄ exhibiting higher rates, concentrations (2–4 orders greater), and a broader influence range than CO₂. This work interprets the synergistic regulatory mechanism between driving forces and pollutant density, providing a theoretical basis for ventilation optimization and pollution control in high-rise buildings. Full article

This study evaluates the structural performance of sliding-type evacuation ladders under realistic fire evacuation loading conditions using parametric numerical analysis. A series of finite element models was developed based on the original ladder design, and key parameters—including member thickness (1–4 mm), overlap length between modular units (40–70 mm), loading configurations, and boundary conditions at the ladder base—were systematically varied. A total of 288 numerical cases were analyzed to investigate their influence on global displacement behavior. The results indicate that a minimum member thickness of 2 mm is required to satisfy displacement-based serviceability criteria; however, this threshold may be insufficient when connection flexibility is considered. The overlap length has a more pronounced effect on structural performance for thinner members, while the loading height has a significant effect on the displacement response. In addition, the boundary condition at the ladder base plays a critical role, with vertical support conditions substantially reducing overall displacement. These findings highlight the importance of system-level structural evaluation beyond component-based testing. They also provide practical insights for improving the design criteria and installation conditions of evacuation ladders in high-rise residential buildings during fire emergencies. Full article

To address the mismatch between spatial form and wind environment of residential districts in cold-region valley-type cities, which leads to poor thermal comfort, low ventilation efficiency and high building energy consumption, this study takes Hongyun Runyuan, a typical large-scale residential district in Lanzhou, as the research case. Using orthogonal experimental design, nine spatial schemes were developed with three core morphological parameters (building orientation, spacing coefficient, enclosure degree), each set with three levels. CFD simulations via PHOENICS were performed to analyze the influence weight of each parameter on the winter wind environment at 1.5 m pedestrian height. Results show that building orientation exerts an extremely significant effect on the winter wind environment (p = 0.006), while the spacing coefficient and enclosure degree have no significant independent effects (all p > 0.05). The optimal scheme, featuring 10° east of south orientation, 1.1 spacing coefficient and 0.3 enclosure degree, can effectively meet the winter wind protection demand. The quantitative optimization strategies proposed in this study provide scientific support for wind-friendly residential planning and building energy efficiency improvement in cold-region valley-type cities. Full article

Indoor temperature time series in district-heating buildings are often contaminated by anomalies embedded in nonstationary, multiscale thermal dynamics. This study proposes a hybrid Empirical Wavelet Transform and Long Short-Term Memory (EWT-LSTM) framework for adaptive anomaly detection and localized reconstruction. Evaluated on 15 min interval data from 45 residential units over a 112-day heating season, the framework operates via a highest-frequency branch for anomaly detection and a full-modal branch for signal repair. Quantitative results show that the EWT Highest-Frequency LSTM (EWT(HF)-LSTM) achieved the best anomaly discrimination among decomposition variants with an average F1-score of 0.531. For anomaly repair, the full EWT-LSTM produced the highest fidelity with a localized Root Mean Square Error ($RMS{E}_a$) of 0.818 °C. Furthermore, thermal comfort validation demonstrated that EWT-LSTM successfully prevented the severe comfort degradation of up to −82% in Exceeded Degree-Hours caused by unstable Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD)-based reconstructions. These concrete results confirm that the proposed framework effectively provides clean, physically coherent temperature data for downstream district heating operations. Full article

Industrial heritage adaptive reuse occupies a structurally privileged position for degrowth: heritage listing already institutionalises material sufficiency as a regulatory obligation, mandating low intervention and resisting the demolish-and-replace logic of resource-intensive development. Yet this regulatory floor imposes no ceiling on how protected structures are programmed or who benefits; the same statutory instrument can produce different schemes depending entirely on governance. This paper demonstrates that gap through two contrasting UK gasholder adaptive reuse projects: King’s Cross Gasholders in London (private-led, luxury residential) and Granton Gasholder in Edinburgh (council-led community park). Applying De Castro Mazarro et al.’s multi-scalar degrowth framework across building, neighbourhood, and city scales through document analysis and site observations, we identify structural mechanisms explaining why building-scale alignment fails to propagate upward. The findings indicate three governance conditions are necessary to convert the structural degrowth potential of industrial heritage into substantive outcomes: public control over development decisions, community participation extended to strategic priorities rather than design preferences, and explicit integration of degrowth values into upstream planning frameworks. Industrial heritage adaptive reuse is not inherently a degrowth practice, but it is one of the few urban development contexts where the regulatory preconditions for degrowth alignment are already in place. Realising that potential requires governance structures that treat sufficiency and collective wellbeing as binding objectives, not rhetorical claims. Full article

Retrofit strategies to improve the energy performance of buildings have gained significant importance worldwide; however, asbestos in older residential buildings is considered a serious threat to both human health and the environment. Existing studies have generally focused on the health effects of asbestos, the properties of insulation materials, or individual aspects of energy performance, while a coherent and comparative conceptual framework for sustainable retrofit systems is limited. This review aims to systematically integrate the current scientific evidence on asbestos management, alternative insulation materials, life cycle assessment (LCA), and circular economy principles to present a literature-informed conceptual decision-support framework for sustainable retrofit. The study used the PRISMA-based literature selection approach, while the evidence from different peer-reviewed studies was comparatively organized in the context of process workflows, risk considerations, lifecycle impacts, and building-physics-related findings. The literature-based results indicate that incorporating safe asbestos management, low-carbon insulation materials, and circular retrofit strategies into an integrated approach can improve energy efficiency and environmental sustainability. However, this study is not based on a validated numerical simulation, an executed optimization model, or calibrated engineering analysis, but rather on a comparative synthesis and conceptual interpretation of the existing literature and presents a decision-support framework that can guide future low-carbon and safe construction strategies. Full article

Long-term decarbonization of urban residential buildings in southern China depends on the joint evolution of building stock, end-use efficiency, and electricity carbon intensity. This study develops a dynamic stock-energy-carbon framework for urban residential buildings in China’s hot-summer warm-winter region from 2010 to 2060, using Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, and Hainan as case provinces. The model links demographic and housing-space change with stock survival, retrofit of the base-year stock, cohort-specific performance levels for post-2022 new construction, and time-varying provincial grid emission factors. EnergyPlus simulations of seven high-rise residential archetypes show that nearly zero-energy performance reduces province-level EUI by 19.2–26.5% relative to the baseline, with cooling-load reductions forming the dominant part of the improvement in the warmer provinces. Across coupled demand-side scenarios, stricter new-build performance standards reduce 2026–2060 cumulative operational energy by 5.3–10.1% relative to the conservative demand-side setting, while increasing retrofit intensity provides a smaller but consistent additional reduction. Carbon outcomes are more sensitive to electricity-sector assumptions: under the main demand-side setting, moving from the conservative to the accelerated grid pathway advances the operational-carbon peak by 8–15 years across the four provinces and lowers 2060 residual emissions by about 71%. A comparison with available observed provincial household-electricity statistics is added as a plausibility check; it confirms the relevant order of magnitude but also indicates that absolute demand estimates should be interpreted cautiously because of boundary and EUI-representation differences. These results suggest that demand-side efficiency policies must be coordinated with rapid provincial power-sector decarbonization if the residential sector in Hot-Summer Warm-Winter Region is to reach earlier carbon peaks and lower residual operational emissions. Full article

Post-disaster reconstruction programmes create an irreversible window for embedding or foreclosing residential energy efficiency at scale. This study examines the structural determinants of per capita residential electricity consumption (K_MES) across all 81 provinces of Türkiye over 2013–2022 using a balanced province-year panel. We develop two complementary panel models, both estimated by two-way fixed effects (province + year) with cluster-robust standard errors, and supported by GLS-AR(1) and random-effects GLS robustness checks. Note that K_MES measures the electricity component of residential energy use only; we, therefore, also estimate the building-stock model with a constructed total-energy dependent variable that combines residential electricity (H_MES) and natural-gas consumption (X_DG) in kWh-equivalent units. Model 1 isolates the macroeconomic transmission channel through which exchange-rate volatility shapes residential electricity demand. Because the USD/TRY rate has no cross-sectional variation, its identifying power in two-way fixed effects comes from its interaction with province-level natural-gas-heating exposure (sh_gas × EV_DA). The interaction is robustly negative across all full-sample specifications (β ≈ −0.022, p < 0.01), indicating that provinces with greater gas-heating penetration are buffered against currency-depreciation pass-through into electricity demand. Provincial GDP carries the dominant direct macro coefficient (β ≈ 0.27–0.29, p < 0.01), establishing income elasticity rather than the exchange rate as the headline aggregate driver. Model 2 decomposes the building stock by structural system, filler material, heating system, and heating fuel. The dominant predictors are the share of electric heating (β ≈ 1.16–1.27, p < 0.01) and the share of AC-only heating (β ≈ −1.0 to −1.13, p < 0.05), with a total-energy specification reaching R² = 0.92. In the comparative subsample of the eleven Kahramanmaraş-affected provinces, masonry construction emerges as the dominant pre-disaster predictor of per capita electricity consumption (β = 14.04, p < 0.05), revealing structurally distinct stock characteristics that pre-date the February 2023 earthquake. Two re-framings are required. First, since the panel covers 2013–2022, the disaster-province estimates capture pre-disaster structural heterogeneity rather than post-disaster market rupture. Second, the macroeconomic mechanism that prior work attributed to the exchange-rate level is more accurately understood as a fuel-mix-mediated exposure channel. The combined evidence implies that mandatory building-code enforcement and natural-gas grid extension are complementary policy levers in the 488,000-unit Turkish Housing Development Administration reconstruction programme: gas grid expansion reduces the macroeconomic vulnerability of residential energy demand, while masonry-replacement construction standards address the largest pre-disaster structural determinant of energy intensity in the affected region. Full article

Decarbonizing the building sector requires integrating on-site renewable generation with systematic energy management. Among the most widely adopted alternatives are photovoltaic (PV) systems in buildings; however, they are often implemented as a standalone technological intervention (size–install–estimate savings), without being formally incorporated into an Energy Management System (EnMS) aimed at continuous improvement. In this context, this research addresses this gap through an integrated methodological framework aligned with ISO 50001, in which PV is explicitly included in energy performance management through energy review, the definition of an Energy Baseline (EnB), and the monitoring of Energy Performance Indicators (EnPIs) within the PDCA cycle. The approach articulates the analytical sizing of the PV system based on electricity demand and solar resources; its validation through simulation to ensure operational consistency and a technical, economic, and environmental assessment that translates PV generation into a verifiable reduction in energy imported from the grid and, consequently, into traceable improvements in EnPI under an audit-compatible scheme. The methodology is demonstrated in a multi-family building in Chorrillos, Lima (Peru), where a 14.5 kWp rooftop PV system (25 modules of 580 Wp) is designed to maximize self-consumption during daylight hours. The results show technical performance consistent with the demand profile, economic viability under the conditions of the case, and environmental benefits from replacing grid electricity, along with offsets associated mainly with the manufacture of PV components. The residual gap between the Post-PV EnPIs and the ISO 50001 target confirms that PV integration is a necessary but not sufficient first-cycle action within a comprehensive building decarbonization strategy, with demand-side management and envelope improvements identified as subsequent PDCA cycle priorities. In summary, the central contribution is not the PV sizing itself, but its operational and traceable integration within ISO 50001, making PV a quantifiable, verifiable, and scalable energy improvement action for residential buildings in emerging economies. Full article

The evaluation of intervention strategies for the existing building stock, within the context of energy transition and increasing attention being given to sustainability, requires approaches capable of systematically integrating economic and environmental dimensions over the entire building life cycle. From this perspective, the present study develops and applies an integrated Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) model aimed at comparing two alternative intervention strategies for traditional residential buildings: conservative retrofit of the existing structure and demolition with reconstruction according to Nearly Zero Energy Building (NZEB) criteria. The methodological framework, compliant with ISO 15686-5 and based on a simplified LCA-oriented approach inspired by EN 15978 principles, is applied to a representative case study of Swedish vernacular wooden architecture (röd stuga) located in the municipality of Falun. The assessments are carried out over 50- and 100-year time horizons, adopting Net Present Value (NPV) as the primary economic indicator and Global Warming Potential over 100 years (GWP100) and Cumulative Energy Demand (CED) as environmental indicators. The results show that the NZEB scenario, despite higher initial investment costs, achieves a significant reduction in life-cycle environmental impacts, with a decrease of approximately 20–25% in terms of GWP100 and about 45–50% in terms of CED compared to the retrofit scenario. The analysis also highlights a differentiated behavior of environmental indicators—while operational energy use remains dominant in cumulative energy demand, embodied impacts become increasingly significant in the GWP balance, particularly in high-performance scenarios. From an economic perspective, conservative retrofit results in lower global costs over the considered time horizons, although the economic gap tends to narrow in the long term. The integrated LCC–environmental assessment approach highlights the economic–environmental trade-offs and provides a replicable decision-support framework for sustainable regeneration policies targeting the existing residential building stock. Full article

This study introduces a domain-specific multimodal deep learning framework, centered on a Vision Transformer (ViT), to accelerate the prediction of operational carbon emissions in residential buildings. Our approach uniquely fuses two data modalities: the geometric information captured in floorplan images and the quantitative data from vector-based building parameters. By training and testing on a comprehensive dataset of 17,000 residential samples derived from a large-scale open-source Chinese database, the proposed model demonstrates exceptional predictive capability. On the test set, it achieved a mean bias error of 1.75%, a mean absolute percentage error of 2.14%, and a coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.95. Further validation through comparative analysis shows that our framework significantly outperforms established deep learning architectures, including ResNet-18, Inception-V4, and VGG-19, in both accuracy and robustness. The developed tool provides architects with a reliable and rapid method for assessing the carbon footprint of design options, thereby offering crucial scientific support for sustainable building design. Full article