Occupant satisfaction and indoor environmental quality; Inefficiency in structural design

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Jiantao Weng and Cyrille Dunant
• Wednesday 16 January 2019, 12:30-13:30
• Dept. of Engineering Trumpington Street, Baker Building - Oatley 1 Meeting Room.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Tim Forman.

Talk 1

Development of comprehensive model of indoor environment quality based on occupant’s satisfaction in green public buildings in China

By the end of 2017, number of green building projects in China has reached 10,927, more than 1 billion m2 total. Zhejiang is one of the most developed provinces in China. In this study, typical green public buildings in Zhejiang are selected. The indoor environmental parameters of sample buildings were measured and occupant satisfaction was investigated. According to the measured results, although the rates of meeting the standard of indoor environmental parameters measured were relatively low, more than 75% of occupants expressed satisfaction. Green buildings had an advantage over non-green buildings. Therefore, there is a certain gap between occupant satisfaction and the rate of meeting the standard of indoor environmental parameters, which shows that occupant’s requirements on indoor environmental parameters are not as strict as the standards. Meanwhile, the results show that occupants in different types of buildings have different priorities. Finally, based on IEQ parameters, prediction model of occupant satisfaction was established. It can help improve indoor environment from the perspective of occupant satisfaction.

Jiantao Weng is a visiting PhD student from the Department of Architecture in Zhejiang University.

Talk 2

Structural design in practice: what drives inefficiency?

How important is material efficiency in structural design practice? How optimised are the designs? In this talk, I will show how you can reconstruct the price of a steel beam, from the material to the erection. Using this pricing model and carbon footprint estimations, it is possible to establish the trade-offs between costs and CO2 made by structural engineers.

Then, using an automated design tool which determines the optimal Eurocode-3 compliant design from loads and geometry, we apply a Monte-Carlo method to find how expensive and how CO2 intensive real buildings drawn from a database could be. This reveals the potential for costs and materials savings, the optimisation targets of engineers, and key aspects of design affecting material efficiency.

We estimate that nearly half the CO2 footprint in a typical building frame could be avoided, which would also save 10% of the costs.

This talk is part of the Engineering Div D Sustainability and Resilience Research Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Dept. of Engineering Trumpington Street, Baker Building - Oatley 1 Meeting Room
• Engineering Div D Sustainability and Resilience Research Seminars

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.