Energy
Hamed Kamelnia; Afsaneh Ghalehnovi
Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available Online from 05 February 2024
Abstract
Electrochromic Glazing (EC) has seen a significant surge in adoption today, primarily attributed to its pivotal role in enhancing visual comfort, mitigating excessive heat, regulating cooling and heating requirements, and curbing lighting consumption, especially within office buildings. Moreover, electrochromic ...
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Electrochromic Glazing (EC) has seen a significant surge in adoption today, primarily attributed to its pivotal role in enhancing visual comfort, mitigating excessive heat, regulating cooling and heating requirements, and curbing lighting consumption, especially within office buildings. Moreover, electrochromic glazing effectively contributes to glare control. This research aims to explore the impact of electrochromic glazing, as compared to conventional clear windows, on both the south and north facades, with the overarching goal of enhancing thermal and visual comfort within an office complex located in Mashhad. The research process unfolds in two key steps. Firstly, a comprehensive building simulation was conducted to assess daylight performance and gauge thermal and visual comfort using the GrassHopper plugin. Ubsequently, the Honeybee and Ladybug plugins were harnessed to evaluate the Discomfort Glare Probability (DGP) index and the Useful Daylight Illuminance (UDI) index. The findings of this study underscore the compelling advantages of electrochromic glazing over conventional clear windows as a prime choice to maintain balanced daylight levels throughout the day.
In practice, using electrochromic glazing on both north and south facades of a building reduces the annual heating and cooling energy demand by 6.5% and 4.5%, respectively. Additionally, it has a significant impact on reducing intrusive light radiation and intolerable glare levels compared to reference transparent windows, with reductions of 40% and 34.52%, respectively.
Environment
A. Ghalehnovi; H. Kamelnia
Abstract
Today, the focus on the sustainability issue in universities has become of significance considering the climatic and environmental issues. Therefore, universities are moving toward uniting the sustainability methods in their systems. Currently, many universities in Iran are performing essential activities ...
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Today, the focus on the sustainability issue in universities has become of significance considering the climatic and environmental issues. Therefore, universities are moving toward uniting the sustainability methods in their systems. Currently, many universities in Iran are performing essential activities in relation to environmental issues. This study is to determine the share of universities in sustainability quantitatively, and then it analyzes their activities. This research evaluates their activities in two steps based on the clustering and the efficiency of their performance. In the first step, the universities are grouped into homogenous clusters based on hierarchical clustering method with regards to their activities in sustainability area. Following that, the Comparative Table is used to calculate the gained percentage in each index based on the mean of the scores of each group using the data of the year 2021. This is done to have a better understanding of the performance of each cluster and the universities priorities for becoming greener and more successful in green-metric system. By evaluating the productivity and the efficiency of the universities, this study represents the most sustainable universities in group one (as the highly sustainable) and group two (as moderately sustainable) which have achieved the maximum grade in energy, transportation, research and instructive areas. These results also show that environmental variables (including water management, waste and infrastructure management) need to be taken into account by universities.
