Sharif Digital Repository

The sustainable retrofit options may significantly improve the energy consumption and the environmental impacts of the existing buildings. This paper presents a multi objective optimization framework to reach the minimum economic costs and Global Warming Potential (GWP) impact of existing buildings. New energy-efficient technologies for the supply side of the energy system are considered which may minimize life cycle environmental impacts of buildings. Two educational buildings in the campus of Sharif University of Technology are studied. The results show that utilizing reciprocating engine and exhaust-fired absorption chiller reduce the GWP to 133 tons (17.79% of reduction) and 190 tones... 

Building envelopes and regional conditions can significantly contribute to the cost and energy performance of the buildings. Structured methods that take into account the impacts of both the envelope materials and the regional conditions to find the most feasible envelope materials within a region, however, are still missing. This study responds to this need by proposing a novel method using the capabilities of Building Information Modeling (BIM). The proposed method is used for identifying cost- and energy-efficient building envelope materials within a region over the life cycle. First, commonly used envelope materials in a region are identified. Then, BIM is employed for simulating the... 

Conventional methods of seismic rehabilitation with concrete shear walls or steel bracing are not considered suitable for some buildings as upgrades with these methods would have required expensive and time consuming foundation work. Supplemental damping in conjunction with appropriate stiffness offered an innovative and attractive solution for the seismic rehabilitation of such structures. This paper deals with the use of friction damper as a passive dissipative device in order to seismic retrofit of existing structures and discusses the design criteria and seismic analysis of a building. The structure is modeled using the finite element program Sap2000 and is analysed using both non-linear... 

The passive cooling effects of a courtyard of a small building were determined numerically, employing an energy-analysis software developed for that purpose. The passive cooling features considered were the shading effects of courtyard walls and two large trees (of various shapes) planted immediately next to the south wall of the building, the presence of a pool, a lawn and flowers in the yard, and the wind shading effects of the walls and trees. It was found that these features alone cannot maintain thermal comfort during the hot summer hours in Tehran, but reduce the cooling energy requirements of the building to some extent. They have an adverse effect of increasing the heating energy... 

The construction of high-rise buildings has attracted human attention at the beginning of human civilizations’ formation. Presently, making tall buildings is considered as a necessary requirement due to the succeeding reasons: the population increase, the tendency to live in urban centers, the land utilization in the most populated centers of the cities, the need to decrease the cost of horizontal development of cities and technological advances. During the last century, issues related to environmental pollution and high energy use have affected these tall buildings. So, it is crucial to apply appropriate methods and patterns in order to adjust their environmental impacts as much as... 

A simple Dynamic-based Pushover analysis for Plan Asymmetric buildings (DPPA) is proposed with the aim of properly considering the effects of torsional behavior as well as the higher modes in the applied lateral load pattern. According to the proposed method, the peak story drifts obtained from the response spectrum analysis (RSA) can be resolved into their translational and rotational components, and the related equivalent static lateral forces and torsional moments can be calculated. Consequently, for accurate estimation of the maximum drift demands of plan-asymmetric buildings, it is proposed that the drift responses obtained from the RSA for the stiff and flexible edges of the building... 

Solar radiation received and absorbed by four domed roofs was estimated and compared with that of a flat roof. The domed roofs all had the same base areas, and equal to that of the flat roof. One of the roofs considered was the dome of the St. Peter's Church in Rome. Compared with the other roofs considered, this dome had a higher aspect ratio. It was found that all domed roofs received more solar radiation than the flat roof. Considering glazed tiles to cover a selected dome in Iran and the dome of the St. Peter's Church, it was found that the solar radiation absorbed by these roofs is reduced appreciably. In the case of the dome of St. Peter's Church, the amount of radiation absorbed was... 

Mobile and rapidly assembled structures play an important role in building temporary and semi-permanent accommodations and shelters in post-disaster management. One of the most efficient construction systems that can be used in rapidly assembled buildings is lightweight panelized systems. Use of rapidly assembled panelized systems is becoming very popular for cutting the construction time and transportation costs that make them suitable options for rapid assembly construction. In addition, when acoustic and thermal insulation of buildings is important, foam filled composite sandwich panels are an effective solution. Soft, semi-rigid and rigid Polyurethane (PU) foams, which are first... 

Application of the base-isolation systems, as a means to limit the seismic-induced response of structures, has attracted the attention of many engineers and researchers. Due to their importance, the Uniform Building Code (UBC) has incorporated a special section for the seismic analysis and design of base-isolated structures since its 1991 edition. The present work investigates the vertical distribution of the lateral seismic force for base-isolated structures provided by the 1997 edition of UBC (UBC97). Different 6 and 8-story, 3-D base-isolated structural models with LRB isolators are considered, having a variety of effective periods and effective damping ratios. The UBC97 analysis... 

Recent earthquakes clarified that existing a soft/weak-story in a building could completely invert the failure mechanisms of the structure. Several studies were implemented to evaluate the potential risk subjected to the buildings under the earthquake hazard. However, these researchers discarded the effect of soft/weak-story on the demand parameters of their models. This paper presents a rapid demand estimation framework for generic buildings considering the effect of soft/weak-story. In this regard, the simplified model developed according to the HAZUS approach is rectified to apply the effect of soft/weak-story on the structural behavior of the generic buildings. Artificial neural networks... 

In building energy simulation, an integrated modelling of airflow in the building needed. Therefore, in this paper two approaches are used for building energy simulation: zonal network for modelling of the building segments and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for modelling of the airflow. It is noted that a synchronize solution process is needed for the building and the CFD equation-sets. For this purpose an iterative procedure is used to corresponding solution of these equations. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved  

This research aims to optimize a multi-zone Air Handling Unit's (AHU) energy consumption by using a Non-linear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) approach. In this paper, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Non-linear autoregressive network with exogenous inputs (NARX) have been utilized to design NMPC for a multi-zone AHU. The NMPC problem could be divided into two main sections: internal model and the optimizer. NARX serves as the controller's internal model to predict the building's thermal dynamics. GA is then used to solve the NMPC problem and find the optimal value of the control signals at each time step. The proposed NMPC jointly minimizes energy consumption of the AHU and the deviation from the... 

A multi-objective energy management strategy for a plus-zero energy building during a year, incorporating renewable resources, air to water heat pump, micro-CHP, ventilation, energy storage systems and thermal-cooling-electrical loads have been proposed in this paper. In this strategy, a novel technology of wind turbine that has been known as INVELOX has been investigated and collaborated in ZEB planning to reach efficient plus-ZEB at lower cost and pollution. As well the building can sell and buy power to/from the upstream network. The total cost and pollution of the building have been considered as objective functions. Also, the effect of objective function priority on the planning of the... 

One of the novel applications of gas turbine technology is the integration of combined heat and power (CHP) system with micro-gas turbine which is spreading widely in the field of distributed generation and low-energy buildings. It has a promising great potential to meet the electrical and heating demands of residential buildings. In this study, a MATLAB code was developed to simulate and optimize the thermoeconomic performance of a gas turbine based CHP cycle. Three design parameters of this cycle considered in this research are compressor pressure ratio, turbine inlet temperature, and air mass flow rate. Firstly, two objective functions including exergetic efficiency and net power output... 

The purpose of this research was twofold; first, it focused on developing quantitative wastage models for rebar, concrete, brick, and cement, as major traditional bulk building materials, used in Tehran residential buildings. The primary results indicated that multiple linear regression was an apt tool to model the effects of the studied variables on materials wastage. In every developed wastage model, subtractive or accumulative effect of each studied variable was recognized by its coefficient value and sign. The developed models resulted in adjusted R2 values of 0.907, 0.875, 0.920, and 0.790, respectively, for rebar, cement, brick, and concrete waste. Cement, with average wastage of 8.57%... 

The purpose of this research was twofold; first, it focused on developing quantitative wastage models for rebar, concrete, brick, and cement, as major traditional bulk building materials, used in Tehran residential buildings. The primary results indicated that multiple linear regression was an apt tool to model the effects of the studied variables on materials wastage. In every developed wastage model, subtractive or accumulative effect of each studied variable was recognized by its coefficient value and sign. The developed models resulted in adjusted R2 values of 0.907, 0.875, 0.920, and 0.790, respectively, for rebar, cement, brick, and concrete waste. Cement, with average wastage of 8.57%... 

One of the most effective measures for building energy conservation is the implementation of energy codes. The building energy codes introduction in Iran started two decades after the first oil crisis in the early 1970s by establishing the building energy conservation regulation called Issue 19. Nowadays, due to some financial and executive barriers, the implementation of Issue 19 is faced with some difficulties. The most critical obstacle is the low price of energy carriers, which lead to high subsidies of energy and the reluctance of the building owners to implement the regulation. The main goal of this paper is the introduction of an innovative financial and executive mechanism for... 

Irregular buildings constitute a large portion of the modern urban structures. Based on experiences of past earthquakes, irregular configuration of buildings or asymmetrical distribution of structural properties trigger an increase in seismic demand, intensifying the vulnerability of the structure. In this work, the effects of splitting in levels, classified as vertical irregularity, on the seismic behaviour of some 3D steel structures are studied. Studied models consisted of five-, ten- and fifteen-storey 3D steel special moment-resisting frames, split just in one direction, with six different plans. Equivalent static method together with a special pattern for distributing the base shear,...