This e-fact aims to raise awareness of the occupational safety and health (OSH) risks associated with the planning and construction of green buildings, their maintenance, renovation (retrofitting) and demolition, as well as the collection of related construction or demolition waste on site (excluding the subsequent waste treatment and recycling). Some of these OSH risks are new compared with tr...

Despite some recent conceptual studies and a modicum of empirical evidence, urban models do not currently take into account the energy efficiency of buildings. This paper presents a framework for incorporating energy efficiency and energy use of buildings into urban models based on microeconomic theory and pricing mechanisms in real estate markets. Using the example of the IRPUD urban land use,...

The flow in stormwater tanks has a major impact on their treatment efficiency. A measurement method and an evaluation method was developed to identify unfavourable flow conditions in existing sedimentation tanks. The data base is provided by mobile, event-controlled measurements of tracerbased hydrographs. The analysis is based on transfer functions known in system theory. The model parameters ...

Forced air distribution systems can have a significant impact on the energy consumed in residences. It is common practice in U.S. residential buildings to place such duct systems outside the conditioned space. This results in the loss of energy by leakage and conduction to the surroundings. In order to estimate the magnitudes of these losses, 24 houses in the Sacramento, California, area were t...

The voltage of the stator is usually controlled with thyristors. To ensure stable control of the load, the control system requires information about the motor speed. Up to now, tachometers or encoders have been used to measure the motor speed, however, tachometers, with their associated equipment, tend to be mechanically sensitive and are often difficult to install, due to space constraints. Th...

Energy consumption in residential buildings is one of the major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the U.S. Most of the efforts to minimize these emissions contemplate on construction of new high performance green buildings rather than retrofitting the existing residential building stock, which has the greatest emission reduction potential. In this paper, rapidly increasing GHG emissi...