Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
• daylight factor (Rey
2004
); and
• discomfort glare severity indicator, which indicates the annual severity of
excessive discomfort glare (Becker et al.
2007
).
Indoor air quality is generally assessed via the following:
• CO
2
concentration index (Doukas et al.
2007
);
• maximum ratio between the mean concentration of a contaminant over the
occupancy period and the contaminant's threshold limit value for short-term or
long-term exposure (Blondeau et al.
2002
); and
• ventilation rates (Blondeau et al.
2002
).
Acoustic comfort objectives include:
• noise level at workplace in dB (Rey
2004
) and
• noise rating index (Rutman et al.
2005
).
These objectives are, in general, competitive, in the sense that it is impossible to
find a global solution to optimize all of them simultaneously. For this reason,
several decision-aid approaches have been developed for addressing the mentioned
problem, namely based on multi-criteria and multi-objective models. A review of
descriptors usually used to assess the indoor environmental quality of confined
compartments is presented in Gameiro da Silva
2002
. Some other descriptors not
included in the previous list, but suitable for the assessment of quality of indoor
environment are as follows:
• Operative Temperature (T
o
) and Equivalent Temperature (T
equi
), for thermal
comfort. The percentage of permanence of indoor thermal conditions inside the
comfort band defined in an adaptive comfort chart (ISO
2007
), where T
o
is
depicted versus the outdoor mean running temperature, is a suitable indicator of
the performance of buildings without mechanical systems to provide comfort-
able conditions to occupants.
• Average illuminance level in the working/activity plan (ISO
2002
), as regards
visual comfort.
• Percentage of dissatisfied with IAQ. It may be calculated from the concentration
of CO
2
using the expressions presented in CEN
1998
.
• Noise equivalent level L
Aeq
during the working period, in dB(A).
• Reverberation T of the room along the frequency spectrum of noise.
• Sound transmission index (STI).
2.2 Building Retrofit Technologies
According to Ma et al. (
2012
), the retrofit technologies can be categorized into
three groups: supply-side management, demand-side management, and change of
energy consumption patterns, i.e., human factors. Figure
3
illustrates major pos-
sible retrofit technology types that can be used in building applications.
