One important prerequisite for a comparable quantitative risk assessment for different types of hazards (e.g., earthquakes, windstorms and floods) is the use of a common database about and financial appraisal of the assets at risk. For damage assessments it is necessary to represent the values at risk on a regional disaggregated scale and to intersect them with hazard scenarios. This paper pres...

Ancient architecture is an important cultural symbol of a nation, which has high historical, artistic and technology of cultural value. A building not only carries the creator of effort, but also the past with the future of the historical traditions and humanistic significance. It is not purely construction of artistic expression, even more the witness of the production and development of socia...

Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are highly efficient power generators, achieving up to 50-60% conversion efficiency, even at sizes of a few kilowatts. PEMFCs have zero pollutant emissions when fueled directly with hydrogen, and near zero emissions when coupled to reformers. These attributes make them potentially attractive for a variety of applications including electric vehicles a...

This paper assesses the energy and water consumption practices of existing housing in Saudi Arabia, with the ultimate aim of establishing guidelines for delivering sustainable residential buildings in the near future. In order to achieve this aim the current status of a typical Saudi residence (i.e. an apartment complex) is investigated in terms of energy and water consumption using simulation ...

This work presents the implementation of a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme used to study the improvement of the thermal quality in aged residential buildings without any rehabilitation. The controller manages the heating system of an experimentally characterized model of a residential dwelling in a social block built during the decade of the 1960s located in the neighborhood of Otxarkoaga...

This paper is concerned with the design of an Incremental Radial Basis Function Network (IRBFN) by combining Linear Regression (LR) and local RBFN for the prediction of heating load and cooling load in residential buildings. Here the proposed IRBFN is designed by building a collection of information granules through Context-based Fuzzy C-Means (CFCM) clustering algorithm that is guided by the d...

The application of building simulation and modelling is becoming more widespread, particularly in the analysis of residential buildings. The energy consumption and control of systems in residential buildings are tightly linked to the behaviour of people, arguably more so than in commercial buildings which have traditionally been the preserve of building simulation analysis. The input profiles u...

In modern times, when climate change is getting more and more drastic and issues like CO2 emission and energy efficiency are becoming more and more important, it is necessary to find possible energy savings in every area. To achieve these possible savings also in the residential area it is essential to establish Intelligent Building Automation in residential buildings. Therefore, within the fra...

This research aims to develop indicators for assessing green interior design of new residential buildings in China, grounded in the socio-technical systems approach. The research was carried out through a critical literature review and two focus group studies. The results show that the boundaries of green interior design were identified with respect to three dimensions, namely performance, meth...

Air leakage through recessed lighting fixtures has been identified as a common issue that causes extra energy consumption in residential buildings. However, few quantitative studies in this area were found. As such, a preliminary assessment of the magnitude of this type of energy loss was conducted by using three-dimensional (3D) transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. A hypothetic...