Journal of Architectural Engineering

It is essential to design and operate buildings with good indoor air quality because people spend most of their time indoors, and their productivity, comfort, and health depend on the quality of the indoor air. In addition to other indoor-air-quality parameters, the indoor humidity and temperature need to be controlled and maintained within acceptable ranges. Elevated indoor humidity creates favorable conditions for mold growth and building-envelope damage. To minimize such problems, it is important that designers have insight into the level of indoor humidity that will be expected in a building operating under a set of conditions and weather variation. In this paper, the results of monitoring the indoor temperature and humidity of four apartment suites with different occupancy levels are reported. Along with the indoor-air conditions, the local outdoor temperature and relative humidity were continuously measured for 17 months. The indoor humidities in the suites were correlated with the outdoor air temperature and humidity and compared with the European indoor climate class model. Moreover, the indoor-temperature and relative-humidity ranges in the four suites during the winter, spring, summer, and fall seasons and the temperature and humidity distributions within the suites are reported.

Home energy assessments or audits help homeowners diagnose and analyze the energy use in their homes. Assisted, traditional, and deep levels of these audits involve a trained auditor conducting energy analyses on the building structure. Findings from these audits are presented to the homeowner in a report format. Currently, a variety of content presented in the reports is confusing to homeowners. Energy assessments are predominantly carried out by technical professionals who may lack training and skills to address the voice of the customer, in this case, the homeowner. Report content output is served in the traditional engineering paradigm of building science and energy engineering problem solving. This research uses expert opinion to validate the content that is important for presentation in reports by energy professionals. The results then provide a basis for examining current industry practice and identify new research gaps for further development, particularly in the domain of design for human factors. Homeowners are left with little decision-making support owing to a lack of understanding or consensus among auditors in how to design effective reports. This research uses content analysis to quantitatively consolidate subject matter expert opinion to identify the essential components in a home energy audit report. It is concluded that there are two essential sections: (1) a summary of the audit experience, and (2) a summary of recommendations; and two essential formatting options: (1) building photographs, and (2) numbers presented in actual units. Adding specialization or personalization is useful, but only with the knowledge of homeowner motivators, expectations, and abilities. Providing numerical consolidation of audit report content increases the consistency of quality in the home energy auditing process, customized report design, and generation of formats.

The urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon is defined as the differences in temperatures between urban and rural areas caused by the thermal properties of urban materials, urban geometry, and air pollution. Rooftops are playing a vital role in urban sustainability efforts and mitigating the UHI effect. Continuing these efforts, a study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of using recycled broken and waste glass cullet in the production of asphalt shingles to mitigate heat island effects and reduce building energy consumption by increasing the reflectivity of the roof asphalt shingles. To achieve this objective, shingle samples were prepared with and without glass cullet and the Solar Reflectance Index (SRI) of the specimens was measured based on ASTM E1980-11. The SRI of the asphalt shingles prepared with glass cullet and a white pigment powder was found to be 30, whereas it was 0 for the asphalt shingles without glass cullet. A three-dimensional transient finite-element (FE) model was formulated to investigate the thermal behaviors of glass-modified asphalt shingles as compared with convectional shingles. Measured SRI values were incorporated into the FE model, which simulated five climatic regions in the United States. Results showed that increasing the SRI of the roof would be beneficial, especially in hot climate regions where cooling load dominates most of the year.

The residential construction market remains vulnerable to the environment. The architecture, engineering, and construction industry now recognizes natural hazards as an increasing threat to the vitality of the built environment. Resilience has become a central concept for assessing environment adaptations; however, how to assess resilience remains elusive. In an effort to solve this problem, the present work proposes a conceptual framework of resilient built environment (RBE), which focuses on one piece of the resilience puzzle: residential construction in the built environment. This paper also provides a case study to demonstrate how to use the RBE framework to assess the state-level minimum resilience performance for the U.S. residential construction market. Findings from the study indicate that 53% of states have adopted building codes with a satisfactory capability for resilience, which raises a need for new policies on resilience management. The case study validates the RBE framework as a valuable tool for describing and assessing resilience performance.

The thermal performance of structural insulated panels (SIP) and connections, developed and used to build 142 homes in Nunavut, Canada, was studied by subjecting the panels to steady-state cold climate conditions in a laboratory test setup. Testing was carried out using an inverted test hut, in which the panels were installed such that the interior of the hut was cooled down to outdoor conditions, and the ambient lab conditions served as the indoor climate. This inverted setup provides an alternative to using a large-scale environmental chamber when this is not available. Results showed the methodology used in this test is adequate to characterize the thermal performance at both the center of the panel and the connections. In carrying out steady-state thermal simulations on both the panel and connection cross sections using both one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) programs, it was found that while the 1D simulation could adequately predict the performance at the center of the panel, a 2D simulation was required to predict the performance at the connections. The SIPs themselves were found to provide good thermal performance.