Presentations Building Codes and Standards

Enhancing clean air systems to achieve improved indoor air quality and environmental sustainability is crucial. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the importance of portable air cleaners (PACs) and broadened the scope of clean air classification by integrating indoor and outdoor sources with purification technologies. This study examines particulate matter from 0.001 μm to 10 μm across three common clean air systems: mechanical ventilation and PACs. Natural ventilation was also included for comparison. A theoretical framework, validated by literature and experiments, alongside computational fluid dynamics, was developed to analyze the benefits and risks. Results indicated that over 70% of purification benefits were due to air changes per hour, with evident variation in deposition across particle sizes, affected by different indoor airflow diffusion designs. Infiltration was dual, while differences in the coagulation term were negligible. Additionally, penetration, deposition, and coagulation variations were significantly affected by building types and occupant behaviors.

Australian homes are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, often leading to demolition or costly repairs. Climate change is driving more frequent and severe flooding and the impacts are compounded by poor land use planning and limited adoption of flood resilient construction practices. Despite the escalating risks, Australian building regulations are relatively simplistic and lag behind best practice for flood resilience. Biomimicry – the practice of emulating adaptive strategies from living systems – offers promising opportunities to enhance flood resilience in the built environment. By learning from nature’s adaptations for managing water, biomimetic design can contribute to reducing the social, economic and environmental impacts of flooding in the built environment. This research investigates how biomimetic solutions could be integrated into the design, construction and operation of Australian residential construction to improve flood resilience within the constraints of the existing building code.

As the impacts of climate change become more evident, maintaining healthy indoor air quality (IAQ) and preventing overheating are becoming increasingly critical. Canadian buildings, traditionally designed to retain heat, now face challenges due to more frequent and intense heatwaves. Older social housing stock, in particular, lacks adequate IAQ monitoring and management with insufficient data on indoor conditions. This study examines indoor conditions in selected social housing units in Western Canada. Using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, we monitored IAQ in 20 social housing dwellings. Findings indicate a tendency for these units to overheat, often exceeding comfort thresholds, even with moderate outdoor temperatures. It was shown that sole reliance on weather observations and forecasts can misclassify indoor overheating and its effects. To address this, an automated predictive model was developed to forecast indoor temperatures 24 hours in advance, acting as an early warning system for building managers to efficiently respond to potential overheating events.

Prefabrication in a controlled, factory setting may improve the energy performance of modular buildings compared to traditional site-built buildings. This research provides energy performance data on 48 modular and 158 site-built multifamily buildings in the U.S. Results suggest that the performance of energy measures in modular multifamily construction meets or exceeds the performance of energy measures in site-built construction. Although few differences were observed between the types of materials and equipment used in either modular or site-built multifamily construction, the installation quality of energy measures in modular multifamily construction appeared to be better when compared to site-built construction. Findings also suggest that the post-occupancy energy use of modular multifamily buildings (114.5kWh/m2/yr) was comparable to site-built buildings (113.2kWh/m2/yr). However, since two-thirds of the modular projects studied were affordable housing, dwelling units were smaller (51.9m2) compared to market rate site-built units (76.9m2). When normalized for ~30% higher occupant density, modular buildings had significantly better energy efficiency compared to site-built buildings.

This research aims to maximize acceptable indoor daylighting levels by optimizing glazing Visible Transmittance (VT) parameter across multi-sectional curtain wall facades. A north-facing, side-lit office in Sydney, Australia, serves as the case study, where optimization is performed using the Brute Force algorithm via Grasshopper's Colibri plugin. Daylight performance is assessed with Ladybug Tools and the Radiance engine based on the well-lit area (D_L) metric where it is between 320 to 800 lux for three visible transmittance values in daylight, view, and spandrel sections (〖VT〗_D, 〖VT〗_V, 〖VT〗_S). The proposed multi-sectional optimization (〖VT〗_MSO,Scenario A) achieves a 21% improvement in the well-lit area (D_L), outperforming alternative approaches with 8%, 13%, 14.5%, and 16% enhancement for spandrel (〖VT〗_SSO,Scenario D), daylight (〖VT〗_DSO,Scenario B), view (〖VT〗_VSO,Scenario C), and uniformly optimized VT (〖VT〗_UO,Scenario E),respectively, with specific VT values in each section and provided well-lit area (D_L), offering design guidelines for sustainable daylighting practices.

The low-carbon renewal of traditional buildings is one of the key approaches to achieving global climate targets. However, current evaluation standards inadequately consider the characteristics and historical preservation requirements of traditional buildings, leading to ineffective guidance for their sustainable renewal.This study focuses on the applicability of China's current standard “Assessment standard for green building” GB/T50378-2019 in the low-carbon retrofit of bungalow courtyards in the Old City of Beijing. We tried to construct an evaluation system suitable for the low-carbon retrofit of bungalow courtyards in Beijing's old city through methods including field surveys, expert ratings, and analytic hierarchy process(AHP). This system aims to provide a universal reference for green renewal actions that combine high cultural heritage value with practical residential needs in traditional buildings of the old city. The research compares relevant items from ASGB, LEED, BREEAM, DGNB, and CASBEE based on four aspects: the scale of old city streets and alleys, the spatial pattern of courtyard houses, the green transformation of community operation, and the full life cycle.It systematically analyzes the adaptability of the 100 evaluation items in ASGB to Beijing's old city and proposes modification suggestions.Ultimately, 20 mandatory control indicators such as the use of underground space and adjustable sun shading are removed, and 4 flexible scoring indicators are added, including the inheritance of courtyard spatial patterns, coordination of facade styles, prolongation and utilization of brick-wood structures, and enhancement of functional suitability. The new evaluation index system conforms to the low-carbon renewal of bungalow courtyards in the Old City of Beijing which includes six aspects: durability, comfort, environment, energy, management, and value sustainability, with 43 scoring indicators are assigned weights.