Abstract

In tropical countries such as India, increasing the roof albedo helps to reduce the heat ingress through the roof. This further reduces air-conditioning energy consumption in conditioned buildings and increases comfort in unconditioned buildings. In order to help users determine the benefits of high albedo roofs under varying conditions, a simple calculator has been developed. Parameters such as location, building type, roof area, and surface properties of the roof are taken as inputs. Annual EnergyPlus simulations are performed for the given parameters and the results are displayed in both graphical and tabular formats. It also calculates the simple payback by comparing a given base case roof albedo with the proposed roof albedo. The calculator can perform comfort simulations for unconditioned buildings and simulates measures including a radiant barrier system and under deck roof insulation. The calculator also runs a parametric simulation between insulation thickness and roof albedo to find an optimum roof insulation thickness based on incremental internal rate of return. This paper presents the features of the cool roof calculator and the type of analysis that can be performed using the cached results.

Abstract

Increasing roof reflectance reduces absorption of solar radiation, roof surface temperature and heat ingress into the building. This leads to an increase in indoor comfort and reduction in room air temperature that in turn results in energy saving by reducing AC demand. To assess this impact of cool roofs on buildings in rural and peri-urban areas of India, a study was performed on two un-conditioned school buildings in Hyderabad (ZPH School) and Nagpur (VNHM School). Two classrooms of same size, function, and occupancy from both the school buildings were monitored for a period of ten weeks starting from March 2014 till May 2014. The data from the experiments and their analyses showed promising results. The average reduction and peak reduction in indoor air, roof underdeck and roof overdeck surface temperatures are 2.1 ◦C, 5.0 ◦C and 12.3 ◦C and 4.3 ◦C, 10.0 ◦C and 26.3 ◦C respectively for the room with white roof as opposed to grey roof in ZPH School and 1.5 ◦C, 4.0 ◦C and 9.5 ◦C, and 3.3 ◦C, 4.2 ◦C, and 25.2 ◦C respectively in VNHM School. The results from the experiment prove that white roof has a significant effect in reducing the indoor air temperatures in buildings due to reduction in outdoor and indoor roof surface temperature

Abstract

Selecting a high albedo (solar reflectance) waterproofing layer on the top of a roof helps lower the roof’s surface temperature and reduce the air conditioning energy consumption in the top floor of a building. The annual energy savings depend on factors including weather, internal loads, and building operation schedule. To demonstrate the energy saving potential of high albedo roofs, an apparatus consisting of two nearly identical test chambers (A and B) has been built in four Indian climates: Chennai (hot & humid), Bangalore (temperate), Jhagadia (Hot & dry) and Delhi (composite). Each chamber has well-insulated walls to mimic the core of an office building. Both chambers have the same construction, equipment, and operating schedule, differing only in roof surface. The reinforced cement concrete roof of Chamber A is surfaced with a low-albedo cement layer, while that of Chamber B is surfaced with a high-albedo water proof membrane (change in solar reflectance of 0.28). The experiment will be carried out for one year to explore seasonal variations in energy savings. Initial results in the month of July (post summer) shows that savings from high albedo roof ranges from 0.04 kWh/m2/day in temperate climates, to 0.08 kWh/m2/day in hot & dry climate.

Abstract

Land use land cover (LULC) information at temporal scale has become necessary in the analysis of environmental progression, resource management and planning. Uncontrolled expansion of human activities are playing an important role in global land use land cover change affecting ecology, climate change, soil erosion and hydrological regime. Visualizing and quantifying future changes of land use is also essential in high forested regions such as Uttara Kannada to ensure appropriate management practices and policies for maintaining the ecosystem services provided by forests. The landscape transition has accounted across five forest jurisdictions from 2004 to 2013 and visaulised further by non-agent based modeling for 2026. Cellular automata (CA), Markov chain model approaches has evolved as a promising tools of visualisation helps in complicated decision making process to understand the neighboring effects of land use activities. The Haliyal division has lost major cover from 2004 (55.48%) to 2013 (45.29%) due to increase in population pressure, unplanned developmental activities and conversion of forest area into

Abstract

There have been various ways in which the indoor space of a building has been defined. In most of the cases the models have specific purpose on which they focus such as facility management, visualisation or navigation. The focus of our work is to define semantics of a model which can incorporate different aspects of the space within a building without losing any information provided by the data model. In this paper we have suggested a model which defines indoor space in terms of semantic and syntactic features. Each feature belongs to a particular class and based on the class, has a set of properties associated with it. The purpose is to capture properties like geometry, topology and semantic information like name, function and capacity of the space from a real world data model. The features which define the space are determined using the geometric information and the classes are assigned based on the relationships like connectivity, openings and function of the space. The ontology of the classes of the feature set defined will be discussed in the paper.

Abstract

LANDSAT images are used to identify organic contaminants in water bodies, but, there is no enough evidence in present literature that LANDSAT is also good in identifying a mixture of organic and mineral contaminants such as agricultural waste. The focus of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of LANDSAT imagery to identify organic and mineral contamination (OMC) and to identify spread extent variations of pollution over the season/year in the Nagarjuna Sagar (NS) reservoir using only satellite images. A new band combination is proposed in order to detect OMC, because existing formulae based on band ratio proved to be inadequate in detecting the contamination in NS. Difference in reflectance values of Red and Green channel of an image helps clearly distinguish clear water from OMC water. This procedure was applied over LANDSAT data of the calendar years 2008, 2014 and 2015 to understand the contamination spread pattern through the reservoir. Results show that contamination is following a similar pattern over these calendar years. In January contamination starts at inlets and by May contamination spreads to almost 90% of the reservoir when the total area of water spread is also reduced by half. Contamination spread is low during the monsoonal period of June to September due to heavy inflow and heavy outflow of waters from NS reservoir. Post monsoon NS is contaminated again because of heavy inflow of runoffs from neighboring land use and limited water outflow. This contamination spread pattern matches the agricultural seasons and fertilizer application pattern in this region, indicating that agricultural use of fertilizers could be one of the primary causes of contamination for this waterbody.

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the application of Autotune, a methodology aimed at automatically producing calibrated building energy models using measured data, in two case studies. In the first case, a building model is de-tuned by deliberately injecting faults into more than 60 parameters. This model was then calibrated using Autotune and its accuracy with respect to the original model was evaluated in terms of the industry-standard normalized mean bias error and coefficient of variation of root mean squared error metrics set forth in ASHRAE Guideline 14. In addition to whole-building energy consumption, outputs including lighting, plug load profiles, HVAC energy consumption, zone temperatures, and other variables were analyzed. In the second case, Autotune calibration is compared directly to experts’ manual calibration of an emulated-occupancy, full-size residential building with comparable calibration results in much less time. The paper concludes with a discussion of the key strengths and weaknesses of auto-calibration approaches.

Abstract

Relational databases have been around for a long time, and Spatial databases have exploited this feature for close to two decades. The recent past has seen the development of NoSQL non-relational databases, which are now being adopted for spatial object storage and handling too. Moreover, this is gaining ground in the context of increased shift towards Geospatial Web Services on both the Web and mobile platforms especially in the user-centric services, where there is a need to improve the query response time. This paper attempts to evaluate the performance of an existing NoSQL database ‘MongoDB’ with its inbuilt spatial functions with that of an SQL database with spatial extension ‘PostGIS’ for two fundamental spatial problems—line intersection and point containment problem, across a range of datasets, with varying feature counts. Given these results, NoSQL databases may be better suited for simultaneous multiple-user query systems including Web-GIS and mobile-GIS. Further studies are required to understand the full potential of NoSQL databases across various geometries and spatial query types.

Abstract

Urbanization is rapidly increasing in almost every city in India. Huge infrastructure developmental plans have been laid by the government and private organizations. Large advertising boards of tall buildings (ranging from 30 to 50 floors) already started attracting people to invest in these infrastructure plans. However, from the point of view of seismic hazard prevailing in the country,“Will these buildings survive during future earthquakes?” is a question to be answered before proceeding for construction. In last 2.5 decades, 7 moderate earthquakes have been witnessed: Bihar-Nepal border (M6. 4) in 1988, Uttarkashi (M6. 6) in 1991, Killari (M6. 3) in 1993, Jabalpur (M6. 0) in 1997, Chamoli (M6. 8) in 1999, Bhuj (M6. 9) in 2001, A&N Islands (M9. 3) in 2004, Muzaffarabad (M7. 2) in 2005, Sikkim (M6. 8) in 2011 and more recently Twin Earthquakes in the neighborhood Nepal. These earthquakes have clearly exposed the lack of understanding of seismic hazard of the country. Sometimes, even when the hazard is understood, the lack of knowledge is exposed on earthquake resistant design and construction practice of reinforced concrete structures. The professionals involved in building construction should be more concerned with the safety of building infrastructure during future earthquake events. Among several aspects, natural period of building is one of the crucial parameters which decide the seismic demand of the building. Present study focuses on developing an empirical expression of fundamental natural period of RC tall buildings in India with the help of ambient vibration tests. Through the study it is found that the periodheight relationship is …

Abstract

Indian standard code of practice for plain and reinforced concrete IS 456 was last revised in 2000 after 22 years of the third revision. The major revision done in the new code is shift in design philosophy from working stress method to limit state method. The new code has not shown any significant changes in the concepts of structural design, material properties for high strength of concrete and steel, material grade limitation for seismic design, design of deep beam and walls, design of infilled frames, design of beam column joint and provisions for effective length of frame members. The code does not clearly mention about mode of failures such as shear, flexure in structural members. In the present paper a comprehensive literature review on the design strength of materials, stress stain curve for concrete, steel and confined concrete, partial safety factors and limitations/recommendations for usage of concrete grade and reinforcement steel grade in design provisions of Indian Standards, American Standards, European Standards, New Zealand Standards, Japanese Standards and from the latest available literature is done.