Publications related to Designing healthy, comfortable and energy-efficient buildings: lessons from enquiries within the european Hope project

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

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

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

Dusan Licina

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

Electrical and Optical Manifestations of Flat Band Physics in Van der Waals Materials

Gabriele Pasquale

The scientific progress is significantly transforming contemporary society with the introduction and widespread application of technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Despite their profound impact, these technologies necessitate en ...

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

Energy, SBS symptoms, and productivity in Swiss open-space offices: Economic evaluation of standard, actual, and optimum scenarios

Cecile Anne Berquand, Dusan Licina, Dolaana Khovalyg, Arnab Chatterjee, Verena Marie Barthelmes

The fundamental aspiration of new-generation high-performing buildings is to reduce energy use while securing indoor environmental quality conducive to human health and productivity. However, existing frameworks for identifying Key Performance Indicators ( ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2023

A modelling framework for modern heritage buildings energy simulation

Franz Graf, Giulia Marino, Giuseppe Galbiati

The latest European polices highlight the urgent need to rehabilitate the existing building stock, responsible for 40 % of the EU's total energy consumption. In this process, a key role is played by thermal simulations, assessing the effective energy perfo ...

Elsevier2023

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

OccuVAE: Integrating unsupervised occupancy inference in data-driven energy modeling for human-centric operation

Andrew James Sonta, Yufei Zhang

Data-driven building energy modeling is an emerging solution to facilitate the implementation of energy-flexible buildings. However, its black-box nature hinders interpretation, including with respect to human-building interaction. This drawback may bring ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

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

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

Dynamic indoor thermal environment using Reinforcement Learning-based controls: Opportunities and challenges

Dolaana Khovalyg, Arnab Chatterjee

Currently, the indoor thermal environment in many buildings is controlled by conventional control techniques that maintain the indoor temperature within a prescribed deadband. The latest research provides evidence that more dynamic variations of the indoor ...

2023

Endogenous Energy Efficiency Improvement in Housing and Cement Sectors in Switzerland

Sergey Arzoyan

The reduction of energy consumption in the residential building stock and cement industry is a substantial component of the Swiss Energy Strategy 2050. Therefore, it is vital to identify the potential for EEI in these two sectors. In this study, a new meth ...

EPFL2023

Preserving suspended structures with light façades (1960-1980). Architectural study and retrofitting proposals

Giuseppe Galbiati

Nowadays, the energy efficiency of the existing building stock is internationally accepted as a topical issue. Energy retrofitting is encouraged, improving the thermal performances of buildings, but often altering the historical image of our cities. Attent ...

EPFL2023

A systemic study for enhanced waste heat recovery and renewable energy integration towards decarbonizing the aluminium industry

François Maréchal, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Réginald Germanier

The aluminium remelting industry relies on natural gas to transform recycled aluminium into aluminium feedstock, entailing significant atmospheric emissions. Hydric resources are also affected as they are used as sinks of waste heat from the casting proces ...

2023

RECA: A Multi-Task Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Recommender System for Co-Optimizing Energy, Comfort and Air Quality in Commercial Buildings

Andrew James Sonta

We present the design and implementation of RECA, a novel human-centric recommender system for co-optimizing energy consumption, comfort and air quality in commercial buildings. Existing works generally optimize these objectives separately, or by only cont ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023