Publications associées à Occupant health & well-being in green buildings: Trends and Future Directions

Exploring High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Architectures for Edge AI-Enabled Applications

The desire and ability to place AI-enabled applications on the edge has grown significantly in recent years. However, the compute-, area-, and power-constrained nature of edge devices are stressed by the needs of the AI-enabled applications, due to a gener ...

EPFL2024

An explorative method to support design decisions based on carbon constraints and daylight sufficiency needs

Nazanin Rezaei Oghazi

The global construction industry contributes to 37% of carbon emissions associated to both building operations and construction. To help achieve the net-zero targets set by 2050, it is mandated to achieve a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. As we ...

EPFL2024

Building ventilation and outdoor air pollution: Implications for health, comfort and energy

Evangelos Belias

As humans spend most of their time indoors, indoor air quality (IAQ) significantly impacts their health. In parallel, building ventilation consumes significant energy, contributing to climate change. However, the relationships between the building ventilat ...

EPFL2023

Assessment of Monitoring Strategies for Inhalation Exposure and Occupancy in Office Environments

Seoyeon Yun

Given people's significant time spent indoors, ensuring good indoor air quality (IAQ) is essential because it significantly influences occupants' health and productivity. Office buildings consume about 50% of commercial building energy and 18% of total bui ...

EPFL2023

Taking a step back from glass towers facades to make them compatible with the 2050 targets

Bernard Paule, Sergi Aguacil Moreno

Skyscrapers or glass towers are an extremely common model throughout the world. In the current context of climate change and resource depletion, we need to develop new postures towards these objects, especially for existing buildings that are becoming obso ...

2023

Transparent structured conductive coating for applications in smart windows

Jérémy Jacques Antonin Fleury

Solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth for a period of one hour contains more energy than that consumed by mankind over an entire year. Some of this solar energy is already collected by photovoltaic cells to cover the electricity needs of buildi ...

EPFL2023

Autodigit-RAD: Towards an automation of the radon’s concentration dataflow in a new and innovative building

Sebastian Duque Mahecha, Sergi Aguacil Moreno

Radon is a noble, natural, and radioactive gas coming mainly from the ground which might accumulate indoors and lead each year to 200-300 deaths from lung cancer in Switzerland. A brand new and innovative living lab will be built as of 2023 in Fribourg (Sw ...

2023

DIET Controller: Dynamic Indoor Environment using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Arnab Chatterjee

Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) Systems utilize much energy, accounting for 40% of total building energy use. The temperatures in buildings are commonly held within narrow limits, leading to higher energy use. Measurements from office bui ...

EPFL2023

Influence of outdoor air pollution on European residential ventilative cooling potential

Dusan Licina, Evangelos Belias

Residential ventilative cooling via natural ventilation is influenced by outdoor air pollution. However, relative to climate, outdoor air pollution is not comprehensively considered in determining the ventilative cooling potential of buildings. To assess t ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA2023

Thermal Conditions in Indoor Environments: Exploring the Reasoning behind Standard-Based Recommendations

Dolaana Khovalyg

Professionals in the building design and operation fields typically look at standards and guidelines as a reliable source of information and guidance with regard to procedural, contractual, and legal scope and requirements that are relevant to accountabili ...

2023

Reinforcement Learning for the occupant-centric operation of building energy systems: Theoretical and experimental investigations

Amirreza Heidari

Occupant behavior, defined as the presence and energy-related actions of occupants, is today known as a key driver of building energy use. Closing the gap between what is provided by building energy systems and what is actually needed by occupants requires ...

EPFL2022

Bridging the gap from test rooms to field-tests for human indoor comfort studies: A critical review of the sustainability potential of living laboratories

Dusan Licina, Mengdi Kong

Occupants play a key role in determining final building energy consumption. Empirical evidence must support occupants' modelling. Experiments on human responses to Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) are usually performed in test rooms or as in-field monito ...

ELSEVIER2022

Combining thermal insulation and mobile communication in buildings: influence of laser-treated glazing on microwave propagation

Andreas Schueler, Josef Andreas Schuler, Luc Burnier, Jérémy Jacques Antonin Fleury, Héloïse Ludivine Delaporte

With the purpose of reducing the heating energy in buildings, it is common practice to install energy-efficient windows to increase the thermal insulation of a façade. These insulating glass units (IGIJ) include a thin silver coating acting as an infrared ...

IOP2022

Reaching Thermal Comfort Zone Limits for Resilient Building Operation: A Winter Case Study for Offices

Dolaana Khovalyg, Arnab Chatterjee, Verena Marie Barthelmes

A specific range of acceptable indoor thermal conditions is stipulated by building performance standards to assure minimum dissatisfaction of occupants. Thus, the operation of buildings in practice tends to follow a cautious approach by setting the indoor ...

Routledge2022

Variation in Indoor Thermal Environmental Parameters in an Open Space Office

Dolaana Khovalyg, Arnab Chatterjee, Verena Marie Barthelmes

Building energy modelling is an indispensable component of today’s design method. However, as per research findings, real-life buildings could utilize almost twice the amount of their ideal energy performance. Thus, it is important to understand the variat ...

TU Delft2022

Effectiveness of passive climate change adaptation measures in Switzerland: A climate-based analysis on natural ventilation and overheating risks reduction in dwellings

Sergi Aguacil Moreno, Daniel Zepeda Rivas

Building energy codes have been implemented in Switzerland as well as across the world to reduce building energy consumption, however, due to the progressive effect of climate change phenomena and the precipitate change in occupancy patterns due to the glo ...

2021

Performance of lightweight and heavyweight building walls with naturally ventilated passive and active facades

Mohammad Rahiminejad, Dolaana Khovalyg

Well-designed ventilated air-spaces behind external claddings in the building envelope can potentially reduce thermal energy flow in the entire wall structure. In this study, the impact of the dynamic thermo-hydraulic behavior of the flow in the naturally ...

2021

Field evaluation of thermal and acoustical comfort in eight North-American buildings using embedded radiant systems

Caroline Karmann

We performed a post-occupancy assessment based on 500 occupant surveys in eight buildings using embedded radiant heating and cooling systems. This study follows-up on a quantitative assessment of 60 office buildings that found radiant and all-air buildings ...

2021

The future of IEQ in green building certifications

Dusan Licina

Although indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and human health have been on the agenda of the green building industry, a new emphasis is being placed on building features that explicitly promote the experience of occupants. However, evidence of the performan ...

2021

Occupant satisfaction with indoor environmental quality, sick building syndrome (SBS) symptoms and self-reported productivity before and after relocation into WELL-certified office buildings

Dusan Licina, Serra Yildirim

Recent green building certification programs have put a strong emphasis on occupant health and well-being. For recently emerged WELL certification, we lack evidence about its effectiveness in relation to occupant satisfaction, productivity and health. Here ...

2021