Experts assess buildings’ thermal resilience and sustainability

A Penn State team has been awarded £500k to develop a holistic framework to understand the relationship between thermal resilience and sustainable design strategies for buildings and communities.  

The grant was given by the National Science Foundation.  

Penn State Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering Julian Wang and Co-Principal Investigators Yuqing Hu and Guangqing Chi will develop the framework and then work with the city of Philadelphia and organisations for underserved communities to test their framework. 

According to Professor Wang, building envelopes and indoor physical environments play vital roles in both thermal resilience and sustainability, even if the two paradigms can conflict.        

Mr Wang said: ‘Consider, for instance, low-emittance windows which have been widely accepted as an energy-saving design, but their typical strong solar reflection may reduce a building’s thermal resilience to cold events in winter and also exacerbate urban heat island effects in summer. 

‘We want to consider both situations. The mechanisms to make a building responsive to both extreme cold or heat are fundamentally similar, and we want to quantify thermal resilience for both circumstances.’ 

Researchers have also discovered existing thermal resilience models tend to focus on some variables for thermal resilience at the expense of others. 

The Professor of Architectural Engineering said: ‘In the past, when researchers tried to evaluate thermal resilience, some of them focused on the building itself, like the physics and the walls; some of them focused on the socio-demographic information, like household income, family size or age; some on communities, urban or rural; and some on human behaviours, like do you turn on the air conditioner or open the windows?

‘We’re trying to integrate all the different angles from social factors to physics and human behaviours, as long as they have correlations to both thermal resilience and sustainability, to set up a multiple scale assessment system.’

The team will test commonly used materials and designs under extreme temperature events simulated in a walk-in weather chamber embedded with solar simulators.

They will also incorporate wearable personal thermal comfort monitoring systems, to evaluate how occupants’ sustainable behaviours impact the building thermal resilience. 

According to the experts, this framework may help inform the best relief services for communities and specific buildings at higher risk of adverse impacts due to extreme temperatures, or it could provide insight for retrofitting buildings and future urban planning. 

‘Eventually, we want to have a geographic information system function, so you could overlap this system with a map and click each community,’ Mr Wang said. ‘We could see overall in the city which parts are weaker and which parts are stronger when it comes to thermal resilience. By zooming in, we could also check each community and even each building to understand how likely each is to endure extreme temperatures.’

Professor Wang said researchers will share the framework they develop with decision makers in Philadelphia, particularly those in the sustainability office with whom they are collaborating to gather the information to conduct on this project, to help them make quantitative decisions.

Project collaborators based in China will further test the framework with datasets from different cities and communities.

Photo by Dan LeFebvre