「お知らせ」カテゴリーアーカイブ

US visit 2015 – Solar Decathlon

In September 2015, a group of MaeLab visit to the US for two main objectives, one is to witness the Solar Decathlon competition, and secondly to survey and interview some of the UC Berkeley scholars about the early Stage optimization tools. This post shares the Solar Decathlon visit experiences. The solar decathlon is An award competition for US student teams to build an energy efficient homes. In 2015 competition, there were 14 universities competing, each of which is designed for its home climate,  and targeting their selected client, and the award went to STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. We have interviewed the people in charge, entered and surveyed with basic environmental tools and all the 14 projects, please enjoy the photo tour below…

(introduction will be added soon)

IBEC 7th Energy & CFD Simulations for architectural design education, June 2015

The Institute for Building Environment and Energy Conservation – IBEC holds regular symposiums on the energy-related issues, where Mae laboratory is used to have a discernable contribution.
On the 7th Symposium, Three of the Doctoral students, In addition to the keynote that was delivered by Prof Mae, have presented and shared their experiences with three major simulation tools that they used in their research as well as in the Mae lab studio tutoring.

The symposium, in general, was about exchanging expertise on the Energy and CFD tools. Researchers, Architect, and Engineers have presented introduced various tools showing their Pors and Cons and how they like it to be.

Prof. Mae opened and managed the event. He briefly highlighted the necessity of using the simulation tools to verify the design energy decisions, and how the simulation results can be verified.

Keynote by Prof Mae

Dr. Yasin Idris, a 2nd year Ph.D. student at that time, gave a presentation on the newly developed Grasshopper plugins (LadyBug and Honeybee). The topic was revolving around the extra capabilities of using these tools to elaborate the climate and thermal comfort issues for the students together with their role in manifesting the environmental design. Here are few of these facilities. First;y, the visualization of the sun path together with the annual temperature patterns enabled the students to perceive that in tropical areas (in this case was Sudan), the summer peaks arrive at different months, and that is when the sun is vertical in the Skydome, e.g. April~Ame, but not late June, etc.

Temeprature, Humidity and wind speed influencing comfort- Credit: Ms. Ide Yukiko)

Temperature, Humidity and wind speed influencing Thermal sensation (Credit: Ms. Ide Yukiko)

Another key tool in the Ladybug was the thermal comfort manikin. At the beginning, it was somehow difficult for the student to accept the fact that a 15 °C is very cold and could be felt as freezing for people living in dry climates. This “feel like temperature” is particularly true on windy days (figure below). Students could visualize the co-effect of the drought and the wind speed on the thermal comfort and they could somehow feel what people would feel in a windy and dry cold desert night.

Presentation by Yasin Idris on the use of the parametric tools in the studio projects

Ms. Prudsamon K. presentation was about the FlowdDesigner CFD tool. she started by giving a brief introduction to the FD evolution. The airflow simulation in Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) by using FlowDesigner is
architectural engineering tool for architects, engineers, and researchers under the concept of “Easy,” “Simple” and High-Accuracy at the same time. We showed four examples; 1) Office space with the influence of external heat, 2) Heat analysis for air-conditioning outdoor units with the external wind, 3) Airflow and temperature distribution of large arena and 4) Ventilation for electronic board and heat sinking.

The main CFD example was about our laboratory’s workshop with cooperative at UC Berkeley in 2015, we visited and analysis the Kanagawa Institute of Technology (KAIT) building. We used the program to analyze ‘Air-conditioning and airflow distribution’ for prediction in indoor thermal comfort. Furthermore, we also considered the effects of external wind flow with building surroundings.

Ms. Por presentation on FlowDesigner

Mr. Federico C. talk was directed to the light simulation. he introduced his initial investigations on some daylight simulation tools, such as Diva and Radiance.

Mr. Federico’s presentation on light simulation using Diva for Rhino

Kanagawa Institute of Technology (KAIT) building Survey with UC Berkeley memebrs

The Survey was in May 2015,  and it was a joint activity with the University of California Berkeley visiting group. The survey was for daylight and thermal environment of a building at Kanagawa Institute of Technology (KAIT). The surveyed building is a unique workshop that stands for its open plan, glass facade, and agile appearance. It was designed by Junya Ishigami in 2007, with the concept of having an internal space that mimics the forest and blends with the ambient environment. This concept was achieved by having a fully glazed envelope at all sides and having a scattered structural system that imitates trees. The building is daylit through several strips of glazed skylights. Hence, it was so interesting to survey the daylight patterns and comfort in such one-of-a-kind spaces. Besides, it was interesting to investigate the implications of having such exposure, plus the single glazed and steel construction on the thermal environment. We have found that the building is mostly over lit and users (students) had to adjust the working conditions by adding fabrics to attenuate the daylight either on the skylights or in the glazed curtain walls. The thermal environment and AC basic measurements, aided with subsequent simulations, showed that the building, due to its unprotected and light envelope follows the external environmental conditions. i.e. its temperature starts rising the moment sun shines on it and drops immediately with the sunset. Hence, this building exhausts a tremendous amount of energy in order keeping it at comfort levels.

 

Visit to Okinawa Sept.2014

Okinawa is the southmost part of Japan, and it is the hottest region that experiences severe storms as well. With the advent of concrete, these climatic conditions had led the typical roofing system to change gradually from a tiled roof into concrete flat roofs. Such flat concrete roofs absorb much higher solar radiation compared to the conventional tiled roof. One of the means to modulate the solar gain in such cases is to use solar paints as final finishing or use ventilated tiles that are painted with solar paint. During the lab visit to Okinawa in 2014, we met Prof Tsutsumi, form the local university,  The University of Ryukyus who have started looking at solar paints implementation on the concrete flat roof. We took some thermal photos that show big differences between the typical finishes and solar paint finishes, and there was even some shows remarkable variation between the different solar paint brands.