SOLAR ARCHITECTURE AND ENERGY ENGINEERING

The modern built environment has been developed in a context of readily-available,low-cost energy from highly concentrated fossil fuels.Today’s global energy landscape has dramatically changed;energy costs have become significant in the operation of buildings,and the sector uses a major portion of the global resources of fossil fuels.In recent years a major focus of green building development in North America and internationally has been on setting up sustainable energy practices for the built environment.This focus has advanced energy conservation and efficiency measures for buildings;on-site clean energy generation is now positioned as a critical next step in meeting increasing energy demands while enhancing the functionality and comfort of buildings.“Solar Architecture”as a green building concept addresses sustainable energy practices and the needs of the three major tiers of the built environment:community planning,existing buildings,and new construction.This article uses a case study of integrating renewable energy engineering into university campus energy planning to demonstrate some of the roles energy engineering plays in our built environment.As part of a master planning process for Dalhousie University,solar energy generation potential mapping and the SolarStarRating™system were used to facilitate the integration of solar technologies into the community energy mix.The process identified the buildings most suited to retrofitting with solar technologies,and enabled the best opportunities to be investigated.

Electrochromism-induced adaptive fresh air pre-handling system for building energy saving

Building fresh air supply needs to meet certain regulations and fit people’s ever-growing indoor air quality de-mand.However,fresh air handling requires huge energy consumption that goes against the goal of net-zero energy buildings.Thus,in this work,an adaptive fresh air pre-handling system is designed to reduce the cool-ing and heating loads of HVAC system.The sky-facing surface of the system uses electrochromic mechanism to manipulate the optical properties and thus make full use of solar energy(solar heating)and deep space cold source(radiative cooling)by switching between heating and cooling modes.In the cooling mode,the sky-facing surface shows a transmittance of down to zero,while the reflectance is high at 0.89 on average.In the heating mode,the electrochromic glass is highly transparent,allowing the sunlight to reach the solar heat absorber.To obtain the energy-saving potential under different climates,six cities were selected from various climate regions in China.Results show that the adaptive fresh air pre-handling system can be effective in up to 55.4%time of a year.The maximum energy-saving ratios for medium office,warehouse,and single-family house can reach up to 11.52%,26.62%,and 18.29%,respectively.In addition,the system shows multi-climate adaptability and broad application scenarios,making it a potential solution to building energy saving.