Can sustainability in buildings increase the workers’ productivity?

According to a report published in 2014 by the World Green Building Council, there is great potential for office building sustainability to provide comfortable and healthy work areas for their occupants, and also figure an improvement in productivity for employees who work within these spaces.

This is usually attributed to such factors as the amount of natural daylight or natural materials that are used in the building, and this well-being in the workplace may increase the workers’ productivity in turn, and finally, long-term greater profits from the client’s satisfaction for businesses that use this type of building in their office spaces.

Office buildings with systems of efficient energy do not automatically provide a better work environment in buildings that we are now accustomed to, based a study of office buildings in Switzerland carried out by Lukas Windlinger Inversini, professor of workplace management in the University of Zurich of Applied Sciences, and his team of collaborators.  This is because a building’s exterior is not the only factor that contributes to the user’s comfort; the interior designs in accordance with energy efficiency requirements and the use and enjoyment of the building’s user all play a similar role.

To facilitate the double view, the professor proposes that the building occupants participate in the design from its start, although evidently, Lukas himself admits the difficulty involved in this idea.

For more information click here.

 

Energy In Time at EEBERS

On January 28th Energy In Time will be represented at EEBERS ICT clustering workshop by its project leader Belén Gomez and members of the IES team.

The EEBERS European Project analysed 82 research financed projects and clustered their current technology developments to find common solutions and share thoughts and highlight in search for a common beneficial space of collaboration. They are now looking for experts that would like to support the assessment of these innovations regarding their future relevance and performance. The main focus will be the technological maturity and market relevance of the different technologies currently being developed by all the projects that are integrated into the clustering group.

The Workshop will be organized, at the Fraunhofer Headquarters, in Munich, by the partners of the EEbers Project (VTT [Finland], Fraunhofer [Germany], University of Loughborough [UK] and Solintel [Spain]). EEbers is a research project that started in February 2015, funded by the European Commission and aims to identify opportunities for synergies in ICT-related RTD in the EeB domain and to engage stakeholders in networking for future RTD and exploitation of results.

The projects that will be present at the workshop are the following ones:

• FASUDIR Project, Paul Mittermeier , Demonstration of the FASUDIR Tool and Methodology for sustainable urban district retrofitting projects
• MOEEBIUS Project, Ander Romero Amorrortu, Modelling Optimization of Energy
• Efficiency in Buildings for Urban Sustainability.
• INDICATE Project, Aidan Melia, INDICATE: Creating a decision support system for the Development of Energy Efficient Cities
• STREAMER Project, Freek Bomhof, Tools for energy, cost and quality KPIs in the early design stage
• CommONEnergy project, Wilmer Pasut and Daniele Antonucci: Continuous commissioning in commercial buildings
• Ready4SC project, Andrea Cavallaro, ICT Roadmap and Data Interoperability for Energy Systems in Smart Cities

Energy In Time Year Roundup – Université de Lorraine

Energy In Time consortium partners highlight their main achievements in 2015 and tell us about their prospects in 2016.
Joseph-Julien Yame and Dominique Sauter

A Benchmark Simulator incorporating occupant zones (Rooms/zones) and Air Handling Units (AHU) was developed. The simulator was developed in MATLAB SIMULINK with the help of the SIMBAD toolbox. This simulator was used to illustrate the Fault Detection and Fault Adaptation strategies developed. Both the FDI and FAC modules use model based approaches and hence models were obtained for both rooms and the heat exchanger, the key AHU component. The Heat exchanger uses nonlinear differential equations based on energy balance while the rooms were represented by state space models obtained from system identification of the SIMBAD models.

Both for the fault detection and fault adaptation, the works were logically distinguished as: System level or AHU level and Subsystem level or Zone level. The faults considered were: System Level: Pump or Valve fault, Fan fault; Subsystem Level: VAV Damper Stuck, Zone Temperature Sensor

The Equipment level Fault Detection approach involved the following techniques: AHU Level: Extended Kalman Filter; Zone Level: Unknown Input Observers. For system level fault detection, a structural model based approach for a system level fault diagnosis was also proposed. An approach to develop graph based structural models and to identify faults based on KPIs (Key parameter Indices) was given. For operational fault detection module, contributions included controller loop performance

For the fault adaptive control, Model Predictive Control (MPC) techniques were illustrated at both AHU level (pump fault) and zone level (damper stuck). Another interesting scenario proposed was to explore the handling of zone level fault (damper stuck) at the system level through reference management (air temperature).

The achievements were documented in the final versions of the following deliverables: D4.1, D4.2, D3.3.

Note also that two technical papers (references given below)  have  been presented to International Control Conferences:

1. Joseph J. Yamé, Tushar Jain, Dominique Sauter – An online controller redesign based fault-tolerant strategy for thermal comfort in a multi-zone building. In Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE Multi-Conference on Systems and Control, pp. 1901-1906, Sydney, Australia, September  21-23th, 2015

 

2. Dominique Sauter, Joseph J. Yamé, Christophe Aubrun and Frédéric Hamelin – Design of fault isolation filter for control reconfiguration: application to energy efficiency control in buildings. In Proceedings of the 23th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED), pp. 16-19, Torremolinos, Spain, June 16-19^th, 2015

Energy in Time partner Caverion made visit to Levi Panorama hotel to survey possible additional energy meters

Energy in Time partner Caverion made visit to Levi Panorama hotel to survey possible additional energy meters. Those meters would help IES to calibrate simulation model of the Levi Panorama hotel demo site. As you can see from the pictures, winter has come to Levi and the outdoor temperature is nearly -12 °C.

This beautiful and unique hotel is one of the four demo buildings with different typologies, uses and expected user behavior that have been selected to serve as testing places for the project. Different climatic zones are also addressed as the buildings are located in Bucharest (Romania), Faro (Portugal), Helsinki and Levi (Finland).

The implementation of the Energy IN TIME system will be primarily done through the connection with the already existing building energy management systems (BEMS). There will not be a new infrastructure, but only the additional required elements such as sensors or gauges, that will provide an added value to the existing infrastructure, in order to facilitate the setting up of the whole system in pre-existing buildings.

After checking out all the gaming actions provided by the casino, our reviewers gave the casino an total rating of 4,9/5. Read more to get a detailed evaluation as to how we came up with such a score. Although luck is a significant component relating to online slots,technically there isn’t any luck issue.

Levi hotel is going to serve as the stage for the next Energy in Time Consortium internal meeting that will take place in April 2016.