eCOMBINE – Interaction between energy use, COMfort, Behaviour, and INdoor Environment in Office Buildings

Marilyne Andersen, Verena Marie Barthelmes, Arnab Chatterjee, Maria Viviana Gonzalez Serrano, Caroline Karmann, Dolaana Khovalyg, Dusan Licina, Jan Wienold
SFOE - Swiss Federal Office of Energy, 2021
Rapport ou document de travail

Résumé

This report presents the methodological approach and key findings of the eCOMBINE project (“Interaction between energy use, COMfort, Behaviour, and INdoor Environment in Office Buildings”). In this project, we develop an integrated approach to study the cause-effect relationships between occupant perception and behaviour, combined multi-domain indoor environmental factors (thermal, IAQ, visual and acoustic), and energy use. The eCOMBINE project relies on a mixed experimental approach that combines environmental measurements in the open-space office space with subjective responses from the building occupants. The eCOMBINE framework was applied to two Swiss pilot case studies located in Lausanne (Building A) and Geneva (Building B) with 13 and 31 participants, respectively. Based on data collected in these two open space offices, the outcomes of this work reveal relationships between global environmental stimuli (PART A), multi-domain environmental perceptions in real office settings (PART B), perceived multi-domain motivations behind human-building interactions (PART C), and energy use (PART D). Building simulations with measurement-based input further highlight energy performance gaps between the actual operation (based on real/tracked behaviour of occupants) with respect to recommended simulation input by Swiss standards.

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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/292671?ln=fr

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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/292671?ln=fr

À propos de ce résultat

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Concepts associés

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What will the cities of tomorrow look like? This is a crucial question because in the four and a half billion years of its existence, the Earth has never been so threatened, as it is today. Since 2008 half of the world's population has lived in towns – more than 70% in rich nations. Three quarters of CO2 emissions are produced in towns, 75% of the world's energy is consumed in towns. The battle for our climate, for the continuation of our species and all other life, will be largely waged in cities. Will it be possible to create the ideal ecological town? The objective of this study is to compare actual and theoretical urban forms in order to explore the diverse effects of daylighting and solar potential on densely built-up sites. Indeed, the search for ideal solar orientations has been a persistent problem from the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th. Even today, for all our scientific knowledge and empirical experience of solar energy, making the correct choice has still not crossed the boundary from an enigmatic, tricky art into the field of an exact science. As a first step, six existing urban sites in Switzerland and Brazil, as well as two projects in the United Kingdom, a few generic models and a utopian city, were modelled and analyzed. The goal was not merely the construction of new, exemplary districts but also the transformation of existing towns. The findings have been used to assess the potential of façades and roofs located in urban areas for active and passive solar heating, photovoltaic electricity generation and daylighting. The results obtained from these different case studies revealed large variations of the potential for solar energy collection on the buildings' façades and roofs. Ideally, these investigations are expected to help architects and town planners understand how to optimise solar collection on buildings design. In addition, a study was made of the Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants created by Le Corbusier. According to the latter, the Contemporary City could increase the urban capacity and at the same time improve the urban environment and the efficiency of the city. Therefore the present study extracted the solar potential of this utopian city in order to assess Le Corbusier's propositions. Since 1922, Le Corbusier's studies have influenced architects and town-planners in their choice of orientations and urban forms: it was therefore crucial to discover if this reliance on Le Corbusier was justified. Solar irradiation and illuminance values obtained through numerical simulations form the core part of the method. The method adopted for the entire set of computer simulations consisted in modelling — via a computer-aided drawing piece of software, namely AutoCAD — the digital model of each building or group of buildings prior to exporting them to an urban performance analysis software (PPF/RADIANCE software package). Spatial distributions of solar irradiation and daylight fluxes over the overall building façades and roofs were calculated using ray-tracing simulation techniques to determine the appropriate placement of different solar technologies (passive and active solar, photovoltaic and daylighting). Performance indicators were used to assess the solar utilisation potential of the urban sites (e.g. statistics of sky view factors and daylight factors) in order to determine the optimal solar strategies for a given urban context. In addition, various works and sun-related recommendations that have appeared mainly since the end of the nineteenth century, together with the various scientific models and software tools pertaining to this topic, are presented in this study.

EPFL2010

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On the Adaptation of Building Controls to the Envelope and the Occupants

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The sun is the biggest known source of energy in our solar system. We feel its strength when it gets hot during the the day and we notice its absence during the night when we feel cold. So as to be less dependent on the sun as an energy source, we implemented additional heating and cooling sources to maintain the temperature within a comfortable range. The downside to this is that the majority of energy consumed within the housing sector is used up on the heating and cooling alone. To profit from the vast energy source of the sun we propose a user-adaptive and building-adaptive blind control for residential buildings, that is implemented in prefabricated modules for facade renovation. User-adaptive means that it is the occupant who is responsible for the temperature control within the home. Building-adaptive, in this context, means that the temperature control is established automatically without any user input. Through the evaluation of occupant queries we have shown that a general measure for thermal comfort is not possible for all occupants. Consequently, there is a need for a personalized measure of thermal comfort. In order to create this the occupant enters votes via the interface; from this we deduced statistically the probability of comfort relative to the indoor temperature. According to the profile the control sets its target temperature. The profile steadily adapts the user's preferences and through this we can also capture seasonal changes in comfort temperature. This guarantees that at each point in time the control system knows the desired temperature and is taking action to achieve it. The adaption to the building is achieved with the fitting of a simple thermal building model with data collected by the sensors of the control system. We showed that the monitored data sufficiently fits the model. With the help of the simple model we evaluated different control strategies and optimized them according to the thermal profile. For our performance tests we conducted computer simulations as well as a 6-month field study. For the simulations, a specific test bed was suggested that would assess the saving potential, which can then be compared to the performance of the tested control. Results showed that the suggested control system is capitalizing on most of the achievable energy savings and thermal comfort. A 6-month field study in the LESO-PB building was carried out to test the impact on energy demand as well as comfort under real conditions. It appeared that the automatically controlled office needed only approximately 50% of the average heating energy that was used in the manually controlled offices. Furthermore, the probability of thermal comfort was, on average, 10% higher in the automatically controlled offices when compared to those that were controlled manually.

EPFL2011

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Urban morphology is one of the main parameters influencing directly and indirectly buildings’ energy needs. Despite an increasing number of urban energy and environmental modelling tools addressing these issues, the complexity of physical relationships at this level often constrain urban energy modelers to simplify the problems by considering only parts of the phenomena, thus leading to diverging findings and recommendations related to the relevance of urban morphology. A systematic review of published research works in the field of urban energy and environmental modelling is performed. This involves characterising the research approach, evaluating the physical effects taken into consideration in the models applied, the types of models applied, identifying whether the effect of urban morphology is isolated from other effects, whether the urban scene considered is real or theoretical and parametrised and recognising the performance indicators used for assessment. Last but not least, the type of result and the robustness of the ensuing recommendations in terms of sustainable urban design are critically evaluated according to clearly defined assessment criteria. The main findings related to the impact of urban morphology on energy needs in the built environment are summarised and put in relation to the physical effects taken into consideration, showing that there is no common basis allowing for a generalisation of the knowledge available. Beyond an attempt to cluster the different approaches, the authors conclude that there is a clear need to further develop more comprehensive tools, but also to propose a minimal set of requirements for computational modelling activities in the urban energy field.

EPFL2011

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EPFL2010

On the Adaptation of Building Controls to the Envelope and the Occupants

David Daum

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