We are very excited to announce that the first two DDes Fellows sponsored by the Center for Green Buildings and Cities and advised by Professor Malkawi will defend their dissertations this week. This marks the culmination of very hard work and extensive study, and we are very proud to have supported their journey.
Decision-Making Support in Early Design Stage for High Performance Naturally Ventilated Buildings
Bing Wang
As a response of both rapid growing interest in high performance naturally ventilated buildings and lack of such design decision-making support in early design stage, the target of this dissertation was developing a system that could help designers make smarter design decisions in early design stage by taking natural ventilation into account. To achieve the goal, the objective of this research was defined first, by questioning on the index to be used to evaluate natural ventilation in early design stage. A design based natural ventilation potential was proposed as the evaluation index of natural ventilation. After that, a workflow of calculating the design based natural ventilation evaluation index was developed. The workflow study consisted of two main parts, outdoor wind environment simulation and indoor natural ventilation calculation. IA practical workflow of evaluating the design based natural ventilation potential was developed in the end, with the automatic outdoor wind environment simulation and simplified indoor natural ventilation calculation.Last but not least, the design decision-making support system was embedded in architectural modeling environment to provide quick feedback on design. A building form optimization study was conducted based on the natural ventilation potential evaluation in early design stage, illustrating the potential of this design decision-making support system to help designers for smarter design in early stage for natural ventilation.In conclusion, a comprehensive and practical design decision-making support system for natural ventilation evaluation in early design stage was developed in this research, which was a great innovation for building performance informed design in early design stage.
Designing green walls: An early-design tool to estimate the cooling impact of indirect green walls on buildings in six different climates
Arta Yazdanseta
The Shijiazhuang Forest City; the 2015 Milan Expo; Paris Smart City 2050; and the NYC Million Trees Initiative – these are just a few examples that highlight the importance of Green Urban Infrastructure (GUI) to the future of our cities. Green walls are one component of GUI. Currently, the main obstacle preventing practitioners from considering green walls as a passive design strategy is the lack of a simple and fast method for evaluating a green wall’s performance at the outset of a project. This investigation aims to reduce the gap between academic research and practice. The objective of this dissertation is to develop an early design phase decision-making tool for evaluating the cooling effects of indirect vining green walls while accounting To that end, the total cooling effect of indirect vining green walls is estimated from the sum of the cooling effects of solar radiation reduction and transpiration. Using standardized methods from the fields of agronomy and plant biophysics, each variable impacting canopy cooling performance is been identified and evaluated. Finally, three sets of simple-to-use matrices are introduced to evaluate the cooling performance of various green wall designs in six climatic scenarios.
