Increasing food and energy self-sufficiency in residential areas is one of the key measures to re... more Increasing food and energy self-sufficiency in residential areas is one of the key measures to reduce greenhouse gases emissions as well as to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The objective of the study is to verify the impact of building typologies and urban forms with relative high density on sunlight availability. Computational tools are employed to obtain quantifiable indicators of the potential of each variant for energy and food harvesting. Three typical residential typologies, namely, point block, slab block, and contemporary block, in Singapore were identified. Point block typology was assessed in this paper. Twenty five point block cases were assessed in terms of solar access by using three density and geometry parameters: plot ratio, site coverage and building height. Each case was considered on a plot of 520x520m2. Singapore’s weather and sky conditions (1.3°N) were used for the analysis. Out of the 25 cases, six with the lowest plot ratio between 0.8 and 1.9 achieve...
Urban design always requires the processing of large amounts of data from multi-disciplinary sour... more Urban design always requires the processing of large amounts of data from multi-disciplinary sources during the decision-making stages. However, unfamiliar multi-disciplinary data sets can only lead to confusion and uncertainty. This research proposes a data-driven approach for supporting the urban design process. A hybrid data mining method is used to cluster, classify and rank solution-instances according to geometrical properties and energy performance. An urban design case study is used to demonstrate the proposed method with respect to two performance issues: solar heat gains and natural ventilation. The result shows that the method addressing both familiar and unfamiliar data can effectively guide the designer during the design process.
Building ventilation potential and pollutant dispersion are greatly affected by the airflow patte... more Building ventilation potential and pollutant dispersion are greatly affected by the airflow pattern in street canyons. Two reasons for airflow in a street canyon exist: wind washing and buoyancy due solar radiation on one of the facades of the street canyon. The importance of the buoyancy effect inside street canyons can be characterised by the Froude (Fr) number which is directly related to the air speed (Uref) on top of the boundary layer and inversely related to the temperature difference between the heated wall and the ambient air temperature and to the height of the street canyon. The wind effect on the airflow pattern inside courtyards and on thermal comfort in the surrounding rooms has been studied extensively by Tablada (2006) (1). To study both wind and buoyancy effects, experiments were performed by Kovar-Panskus et al. (2002) (2) in a wind tunnel on a square street canyon. One street façade was heated to obtain a uniform temperature over its whole surface. The airflow pat...
Re-use and renovation of buildings are core strategies towards a rational environmental policy. I... more Re-use and renovation of buildings are core strategies towards a rational environmental policy. It preserves not only the city memory and cultural values but also diminish the use of non-removable natural resources and save energy. However, many after-war modern buildings in Europe have poor climatic design which can leads both to uncomfortable indoor conditions during hot summers and to a high energy consumption by cooling. This study focuses on the simulation, evaluation and improvement of indoor thermal comfort in an existing free-standing residential building in Palermo, Sicily (see ref. 1,2). The evaluation and quantification of the (dis)comfort is a result of simulations carried out by coupling Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Building Energy Simulation programs (BES). Values of indoor air speed and pressure coefficients are obtained from CFD calculations and further used as input in BES calculations and comfort analysis. Two BES programs EnergyPlus and TRNSYS are compar...
Increasing food and energy self-sufficiency in residential areas is one of the key measures to re... more Increasing food and energy self-sufficiency in residential areas is one of the key measures to reduce greenhouse gases emissions as well as to mitigate and adapt to climate change. The objective of the study is to verify the impact of building typologies and urban forms with relative high density on sunlight availability. Computational tools are employed to obtain quantifiable indicators of the potential of each variant for energy and food harvesting. Three typical residential typologies, namely, point block, slab block, and contemporary block, in Singapore were identified. Point block typology was assessed in this paper. Twenty five point block cases were assessed in terms of solar access by using three density and geometry parameters: plot ratio, site coverage and building height. Each case was considered on a plot of 520x520m2. Singapore’s weather and sky conditions (1.3°N) were used for the analysis. Out of the 25 cases, six with the lowest plot ratio between 0.8 and 1.9 achieve...
Urban design always requires the processing of large amounts of data from multi-disciplinary sour... more Urban design always requires the processing of large amounts of data from multi-disciplinary sources during the decision-making stages. However, unfamiliar multi-disciplinary data sets can only lead to confusion and uncertainty. This research proposes a data-driven approach for supporting the urban design process. A hybrid data mining method is used to cluster, classify and rank solution-instances according to geometrical properties and energy performance. An urban design case study is used to demonstrate the proposed method with respect to two performance issues: solar heat gains and natural ventilation. The result shows that the method addressing both familiar and unfamiliar data can effectively guide the designer during the design process.
Building ventilation potential and pollutant dispersion are greatly affected by the airflow patte... more Building ventilation potential and pollutant dispersion are greatly affected by the airflow pattern in street canyons. Two reasons for airflow in a street canyon exist: wind washing and buoyancy due solar radiation on one of the facades of the street canyon. The importance of the buoyancy effect inside street canyons can be characterised by the Froude (Fr) number which is directly related to the air speed (Uref) on top of the boundary layer and inversely related to the temperature difference between the heated wall and the ambient air temperature and to the height of the street canyon. The wind effect on the airflow pattern inside courtyards and on thermal comfort in the surrounding rooms has been studied extensively by Tablada (2006) (1). To study both wind and buoyancy effects, experiments were performed by Kovar-Panskus et al. (2002) (2) in a wind tunnel on a square street canyon. One street façade was heated to obtain a uniform temperature over its whole surface. The airflow pat...
Re-use and renovation of buildings are core strategies towards a rational environmental policy. I... more Re-use and renovation of buildings are core strategies towards a rational environmental policy. It preserves not only the city memory and cultural values but also diminish the use of non-removable natural resources and save energy. However, many after-war modern buildings in Europe have poor climatic design which can leads both to uncomfortable indoor conditions during hot summers and to a high energy consumption by cooling. This study focuses on the simulation, evaluation and improvement of indoor thermal comfort in an existing free-standing residential building in Palermo, Sicily (see ref. 1,2). The evaluation and quantification of the (dis)comfort is a result of simulations carried out by coupling Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Building Energy Simulation programs (BES). Values of indoor air speed and pressure coefficients are obtained from CFD calculations and further used as input in BES calculations and comfort analysis. Two BES programs EnergyPlus and TRNSYS are compar...
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