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

What is NExT? A new conceptual model for comfort, satisfaction, health, and well-being in buildings

Buildings are designed to respond to functional and regulatory needs, providing comfortable conditions to occupants, offering satisfactory environmental settings, minimising health risks, and enhancing individual and collective quality of life. Although th ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Spatial Modeling for Building Design Evaluation: from Visual Landscape Quality Assessment to Devaluation Risk Estimation

Adam Robert Swietek

Zoning reform is a crucial tool for cities to adapt to contemporary challenges. However, its implementation remains challenging. Property owners, with a vested interest in the value of their neighborhoods, are sensitive to local developments and the potent ...

EPFL2024

Decomposition method to evaluate district heating/cooling network potential at urban scale

Luc Girardin, François Maréchal, Raphaël Briguet, Ana Catarina Gouveia Braz, Bingqian Liu

In this work, a tool to design district heating networks (DHN) is presented and applied to the city of Lausanne as a case study. The evaluation of the buildings’ heat/cooling demand is performed using a Geographic Information System (GIS) database, built f ...

Associazione Italiana Di Ingegneria Chimica2024

Performance of energy piles foundation in hot-dominated climate: A case study in Dubai

Lyesse Laloui, Elena Ravera, Sofie Elaine ten Bosch

Energy piles represent an innovative technology that can help provide sustainable geothermal heating or cooling energy for thermal conditioning purposes. In hot-dominated climates, the interest is to inject heat in the ground and extract energy for space-c ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Shaped Laser Pulses for Microsecond Time-Resolved Cryo-EM: Outrunning Crystallization during Flash Melting

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water vitrifies if cooled at rates above 3 × 105 K/s. In contrast, when the resulting amorphous ice is flash heated, crystallization occurs even at a more than 10 times higher heating rate, as we have recently shown. This may present an issue for microseco ...

2024

Flash Melting Amorphous Ice

Marcel Drabbels, Ulrich Lorenz, Constantin Richard Krüger, Gabriele Bongiovanni, Nathan Junior Mowry

Water can be vitrified if it is cooled at high rates, which makes it possible to outrun crystallization in so-called no man’s land, a range of deeply supercooled temperatures where water crystallizes rapidly. Here, we study the reverse process in pure wate ...

2024

Correlating long-term performance and aging behaviour of building integrated PV modules

Christophe Ballif, Alessandro Francesco Aldo Virtuani, Ebrar Özkalay

Because building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) modules are fully integrated into a building envelope, the back of the module can be exposed to little or no ventilation, resulting in increased operating temperatures. As the temperature increases, the perfo ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

Embodied Carbon Premium for Cantilevers

David Michael Volpe Ruggiero, Paola Costanza Miglietta

This study addresses the critical need for sustainable architectural designs within the context of climate change and the significant role the built environment plays in greenhouse gas emissions. The focus of this paper is on understanding the influence of ...

2024

Monopoly Pricing with Unknown Demand

Thomas Alois Weber

The optimal pricing of goods, especially when they are new and the innovating firm is a monopolist, must proceed without precise knowledge of the demand curve. This paper provides a pricing method with a relative robustness guarantee by maximizing a perfor ...

2025

Calibrating and validating the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) urban cooling model: case studies in France and the United States

Martí Bosch Padrós

Understanding the cooling service provided by vegetation in cities is important to inform urban policy and planning. However, the performance of decision-support tools estimating heat mitigation for urban greening strategies has not been evaluated systemat ...

Copernicus Gesellschaft Mbh2024

Climate risk assessment of buildings: An analysis of operating emissions of commercial offices in Australia

Arianna Brambilla

Building climate risk assessment involves benchmarking a building's energy use intensity against decarbonisation pathways to mitigate the impacts on climate change. Various climate risk assessment tools and frameworks are used for commercial buildings in d ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

Renaturation of urban rivers as a climate adaptation strategy Case study in Geneva, Switzerland

Emmanuel Rey, Sophie Lufkin

In a global context marked by the urgency of climate change, tangible actions towards the ecological transition are top priorities for the built environment. This paper presents the results of the “Maillages fertiles” research project, which seizes the opp ...

Wrocław University of Science and Technology Publishing House2024

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

Design and assessment of an evaporating water-cooled methanation reactor for a SOE-based power-to-methane system

Philippe Aubin

The transition towards clean renewable energy sources, where wind and solar are prone to variation, requires adequate energy storage. Power-to-methane (PtM) systems can be part of the solution. Specifically, solid-oxide-electrolyser (SOE) based PtM systems ...

EPFL2024

Flood, farms and credit: The role of branch banking in the era of climate change

Pejman Abedifar, Seyed Javad Kashizadeh

Using Iran's unexpected flood in April 2019 as a natural experiment, we show that local branches bridge the time gap between the disaster and governmental aids by immediately increasing their lending for two months following the flood. Analyzing proprietar ...

Elsevier2024

Models implemented in the methodological approach to design the initial STEP first wall contour

Kevin Henricus Annemarie Verhaegh, Dario Vaccaro, Filippo Bagnato, Davide Galassi

The official Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production mission aims to demonstrate the ability to generate net electricity from fusion with the STEP Prototype Power plant. One of the key technological and engineering challenges in fusion power plants is mana ...

Elsevier Science Sa2024

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

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

Efficacy of temporal and spatial abstraction for training accurate machine learning models: A case study in smart thermostats

Rachid Guerraoui, Omid Ardakanian, Alexandre David Olivier Maurer

Smart thermostats are increasingly popular in homes and buildings as they improve occupant comfort, lower energy use in heating and cooling systems, and reduce utility bills by automatically adjusting room temperature according to measurements of their bui ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA2023

Experimental study of the hydrodynamic and thermal performances of ventilated wall structures

Mohammad Rahiminejad, Dolaana Khovalyg

The presence of a ventilated air gap behind the external cladding in a building envelope is known to have a tangible contribution to the overall performance of the wall assembly. In the present study, the hydrodynamic and thermal performances of ventilated ...

2023