Gavasci / Zandaryaa Environmental Engineering and Renewable Energy

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-0-08-098391-2
Verlag: Elsevier Science & Techn.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 430 Seiten

This book contains the papers presented at the First International Conference on Environmental Engineering and Renewable Energy held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in September 1998. The main aim of the conference was to give an opportunity to scientists, experts and researchers from different fields to convene and discuss environmental and energy problems and also be informed about the state of the art.Today, environmental protection is increasingly becoming a matter of global priority now that the tendency towards sustainable development is growing. The main concept of sustainable development is to fulfill both the demand of today's generation and cater for the requirements of future generations. Hence, sustainable development requires sound management of those environmental and research and development technologies which have low environmental impact and which promote the use of renewable sources.Renewable energies are the only environmentally benign sources of energy and are available at any site and any time of the year. Moreover, the utilization of renewable sources of energy can contribute to the increasing energy demand and also advance the improvement of life standards in rural areas, where it is difficult to establish a permanent connection with central electricity systems. Application and adoption of emerging renewable energy technologies in rural and remote areas cannot be successful without transfer of knowledge, information and know-how.Environmental engineering involves research and application of technologies to minimize the undesirable impact on the environment. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in environmental engineering problems in order to focus on theoretical and experimental studies on atmospheric pollution, water management and treatment, waste treatment, disposal and management.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gavasci, Renato

Zandaryaa, Sarantuyaa

Leseproben

BUILDING DESIGN: SUSTAINABILITY AND SOME ENERGETIC AND ECOLOGICAL ASPECTS

D. Abruzzese*, F. Ascolani* and R.M. Strollo*,     *Department of Civil Engineering, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy. E-mail address: [e-mail]

Abstract

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1 Introduction

The concept of sustainable development is the point of arrival of a process, which probably began, with the oil crisis of the mid-1970s. Rising cost of fuel was the first alarm bell; since then we have acquired a deeper awareness of the finiteness of resources; for too long a time energy had been available in apparently unlimited amount and at reasonable costs, so that none had paid attention to consumption reduction. During the last two decades research has pointed out how the development of human activities has had a destructive impact on natural environment and new monitoring systems have further stressed these dangerous effects. If we also consider the late attitude of mind, which tends to observe everything from the economic point of view, it will be easy to understand how we get to an idea of an economically and environmentally lower cost development. We don’t need to illustrate present wastes and damages to the ecological balance so that it appears clearly how sustainable development is not fashion, and that sustainable stands for the possible maintenance of present standard of life as we are accustomed to.

Sustainable development is a way of thinking, it is an organic and comprehensive way of approaching the whole system of relationships between men and environment, with the aim to optimize and guide human activities growth within affordable-by-the-world boundaries. Someone could object that we have add only a label to our instruments and knowledge and really the urge of facing up troubles such as pollution, the finiteness of traditional energy sources and of raw materials is nothing new, nevertheless the importance of this strategy is just its global view of proper interventions. As fields of human activities involve each other (we have some needs which have an economic value, we need money, knowledge and technology to fulfil them …) isolated interventions would result in a failure, while only a common effort of economics, science and policy will probably success. Being a comprehensive philosophy it involves most disciplines from economics to psychology, and obviously architecture too: bioarchitecture is the application of sustainable thinking to architecture. Since architecture creates the places of human activities it is a very important media between these activities and the environment, furthermore it is surely the most evident instrument by the means of which we impact on nature so that architecture, which we mean to include also urbanistic and so on, has really a great role in planning our future existence in this world.

2 Low environmental impact architecture

2.1 Why we need bioarchitecture

Sustainable development principles characterize bioarchitecture as it proposes itself as an organic approach to well building. From many points of view good architecture is already a sustainable one: good designers should try anyway to optimize all architectural performances including those that we hold to be biocompatible. Most ancient buildings represent good architecture and many devices that are typical of bioarchitecture have been used since ancient times. During this century the ever-growing population has forced politicians, builders and designers to implement low quality buildings with a general falling off of standards. Nowadays we need again good architecture both at the single house level and at the larger scale of town or environmental planning: bioarchitecture is an attempt to realize good architecture.

Bioarchitecture has three principal aims: energy consumption reduction, low pollutant emission, health-care and well being of people (of users directly and indirectly of the population in general), with the awareness that only a global planning of all constructive phases can get to the quality levels required. Energy consumption cutting down was first needed because of high costs of fuel; nowadays we pay more attention to the role that energy production has in the environmental pollution. Because of the present state of the environment we are most interested in our health-care which is actually the final goal both of energy consumption reduction and of pollutant reduction.

Table 1

Environmental Burdens of Buildings, U.S. Data

Building plays a great role in the environmental impact; the following data, even if non-homogeneous or related to the Italian situation will be helpful to have an idea of that. Quarrying and carving materials deeply modifies morphology of the ground, jeopardizes water layers and damages the habitat, needs large amount of energy and produces equally large amount of earth and air pollutant, the production of building materials of each other kind requests energy, then these material are carried to the yard, we must finally add building energy consumption. These amounts are difficulty quantified but we hold them to be relevant. According to the present constructive standards we can asses the energy for producing buildings (embodied energy) at 2000 KWh per m2 of useful built area.

The civil sector (housing and tertiary) is responsible, in Italy as in Europe and U.S.A, for one third of final consumption of energy and in Italy of 30%-40% of CO2 e CFC emissions.

Figure 1 CO2 Emissions Per Sector of the European Union In 1995 (Millions of Tons of CO2 source: European Commission 1997-Annual Energy Review)

Energy of use is due for 2/3 to the heating, cooling, ventilation systems (HVAC) and for the remaining 1/3 to lighting. Unfortunately Italy distinguishes itself by energy consumption: 34.4 TOE (tons of oil equivalent) make Italy the leading European Country for energy consumption [1]. It is finally reasonable to consider also transports, which are responsible for a quarter of total energy consumption and are closely related to settlements planning: a certain savings could probably result from an intelligent design.

Table 2

Average Consumption for Building in Europe (source: ENEA, Italy)

In the following pages we will show how and how much an intelligent design can improve buildings environmental performances. As a general introduction we can say that, at the present state in Italy the use of so called passive design techniques can get to 50% savings for HVAC and 30% for lighting in new buildings, while we can save up to 20% for refurbishing considering only HVAC. Other non-passive ways to approach green design can achieve further performances.

Table 3

Energy Budget In Italy In 1994 (Million TOE, source: ENEA, Italy)

2.2 A green approach to design

A good philosophy of building should consider each architectural system as a holistic one and then try to optimize all life cycle of what is going to be built. Each constructive phase has its wastes to be cut down. Nowadays the building cycle is very complex and only a team of architects and engineers can face the several aspects of an environmental-conscious design; some of these aspects will be dealt with afterwards.

Before thinking of what we are going to build, it would be better to pay attention to what we have already made. Some reflections on the matter should be done. We have already seen some damaging effects and some costs of building as itself (cf. 2.1), further we can say that about 30% of solid urban refuse is constituted by waste material coming from construction and demolition processes and that according to present assessments within thirty years quarry materials will be depleted, at present levels of consumption. Table 5 represents an Italian example of construction costs.

In the end we refer to the Italian state: in Italy there are 21 millions families and 25 millions residential units so that there is no actual need for new residences; on the other hand there is the fact that most of them present not-acceptable...