Browsing by Author "Mahdavi, Ardeshir"

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Field Station of the National Park Academy in Petronell, Austria: a Case Study of Evolving Thermal Performance Expect Ations
(Konya Technical University Faculty of Architecture and Design, 2012) Skoruppa, Linda; Pont, Ulrich; Kiesel, Kristina; Schuss, Matthias; Zach, Robert; Mahdavi, Ardeshir
Sustainability in the construction sector is increasing in importance. Due to a number of factors such as energy resource limitations and increasing occupancy expectations, the thermal performance standards concerning buildings are becoming stricter. In this context, it would be useful to document in practice, to which extent such developments in the standardization domain have affected the actual performance of buildings. The present contribution describes a research effort toward documentation of the evolving thermal performance of a specific building's refurbishment in Petronell, Austria. Subsequently, solar-thermal collectors and photovoltaic elements were added to explore the potential for utilizing renewable energy sources. In 2011, a new effort was initiated to capture the actual thermal performance of the building and its various components and systems in a structured and systematic manner. Thereby, a monitoring system was installed to collect data concerning indoor climatic conditions, user behavior and energy consumption. To put the performance of the building in the pertinent microclimatic context, a weather station was installed on the building. The collected results facilitate the treatment of a number of salient questions: Has the thermal retrofit of the building resulted in the expected performance improvement? How do previous standards compare to the currently valid thermal codes and requirements? What would be the potential of further improvement in building's energy efficiency if the implications of occupants' habits and behavior are considered? What is the actual output of the installed renewable energy harnessing systems? What lessons from the present monitoring exercise can be learned and applied to the context of other building projects? The paper concludes with a summary of the existing and necessary answers to these questions.
A Predictive Approach To Intelligent Building Systems Control
(Konya Technical University Faculty of Architecture and Design, 2012) Mahdavi, Ardeshir
This keynote presents the implementation of a novel predictive approach to intelligent building systems control. The implementation specifically pertains to the utilization of passive cooling in buildings. Thereby, numeric simulation is deployed as an integral part of the control logic to predict future implications of alternative control options (alternative positions of windows, shades, etc.) and identify the best performing control option. A genetic algorithm was developed to generate a manageable set of alternative options from the corpus of all possible control actions at any given time. Five rooms in two office buildings in Austria were used to test this method. The paper describes the approach and implementation in detail and presents the results.
Simulation Model Assessment of a Sound Insulating Double Façade System With Openings for Natural Ventilation Under Guidance of Laboratory Measurements
(Konya Technical University Faculty of Architecture and Design, 2012) Çakır, Onurcan; Lechleitner, Josef; Mahdavi, Ardeshir
Noise control and natural ventilation are two main building physics issues which have contradictory principles. While natural ventilation needs openings on the façade in order to let fresh air in, the desired acoustic insulation is provided with minimum openings or without any opening on the wall. This paper presents a comparison between the simulation model results and laboratory measurements of a double façade system which is proposed in order to minimize outdoor noise coming through façade openings in naturally ventilated buildings. The double façade with twenty five openable equal-size particleboard panels on each side was constructed as a full scale model in the laboratory and the same setup was modeled in a computer simulation program. Different parts from these two parallel walls were taken out and the effect of the distance between these openings on the sound reduction value of the system has been analyzed. After the measurements; materials, their sound absorption coefficients and the reverberation times of two rooms were calibrated in the simulation program accordingly and simulations were run in order to check if it would be possible to continue this research only with computer models. The results are compared and differences between the simulation and laboratory measurements are stated in this paper.