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Abstract
"EcoShopping project aims to build a holistic retrofitting solution for commercial buildings to reduce primary energy consumption down to less than 80kWh/m2 per year and increase the share of RES (Renewable Energy Sources) more than 50% compared to the state of the art. The approach will be systemic by developing (1). Novel thermal insulation solutions using cost effective materials to further reduce the thermal losses and lower the energy consumption. (2). Easy to install and cascadable daylighting technologies based on the NLIS system to reduce energy billing and improve comfort. (3). HVAC Retrofitting systemic approach based on RES direct powered DC variable speed heat pump and harnessing the Building Thermal Mass for reducing the energy consumption. (4). Integrated solution way based on the Intelligent Automation Unit (IAU) concept and Mobile Robot.
The project intends to use and integrate available products and technologies along with a network of low-cost equipment to accurately monitor the environmental and occupancy parameters to have a better control of the BAM and full exploitation of the Building Thermal Mass, which serves as a “Thermal Battery” and stores the RES directly without using battery, tank or other expensive storage material and simplifying the system structure. The purpose is to reduce the energy consumption without losing comfort for users and providing, at the same time, higher energy performance, security and healthy, automatic and reliable services to visitors, building operators and owners. For this the development of the IAU and the extension of Mobile Robot plays an important role, in concept of accurate control, demand reduction, user oriented and friendly service, building security etc."
Work Packet
- WP1. Financial and administrative management To provide overall project administration and governance: comprising all issues relevant to the fulfillment of the project, meeting and exceeding the EC mandatory requirements, and providing support to facilitate an easy information interchange among the partners, other relevant consortia, and the EC for the overall control and coordination of the project. To provide strategic focus for the project: comprising activities related to necessary interventions to ensure the successful completion of the project by including further dissemination and exploitation of the research results emerging from the project.
- WP2. Continuous Assessment and Standardization The overall objective of this WP is to offer a continuous assessment along with the entire project, in the first phase, basic demo building assessment will be carried out in order to offer plenty information for the development of each retrofitting technologies, such user requirement, scenarios, retrofitting methodologies, building characteristics and building performance before retrofitting. In the second phase, assessments also present an important role for optimization, feasibility and viability, impact analysis of each technology in development. In the third phase, when all the technologies will be implemented to the demo, assessments such as the gaps between simulation results and monitored data will be located, environmental impacts will also be analyzed during the construction period.
- WP3. Envelope and Day lighting technologies This WP will develop different forefront strategies for external and/or internal insulation of the envelope through the identification of the best innovative insulation solutions for walls and windows. Furthermore self-cleaning materials will be identified to enhance the indoor air quality. They will be tested in laboratory and compared with the most commonly used ones available in the market. The most promising will be finally installed in the case study. An evaluation of their efficiency in term of insulation but also comfort and health will be performed. WP3 will also develop cost-efficient and easy-to-install intelligent natural light illumination system (NLIS) composed of light collecting, light transmitting and light emitting subsystems. The system not only directs sunlight into the dark or energy inefficient area during day hours, its light collecting and transmitting components are also to be developed as energy-efficient outdoor lighting accessories during night hours by applying the reciprocal characteristics of light. In addition, The NLIS system is equipped with the capability of filtering down the light spectrum to meet the needs of different application requirements.
- WP4. HVAC and RES integration This WP aims to retrofit the HAVC systems with energy efficient technologies and cost effective solutions. An integrated solution combining radiant ceiling for cooling and heating and renewable energy is developed, allowing the system to exploit the full potential of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). As a cost-efficiency strategy to be studied and finally applied for the HVAC system, it includes the following aspects: (1), Deployment of a Capillary Tube Technology with uniform cooling, high cooling capacity, low pressure and low installation expense. Similar to what blood vessels in the human body do, the water carrying the capillary tubes are distributed through the room area. Due to the excellent properties regarding durability and compatibility to the environment, the use of polypropylene as highly pure material can be operated up to temperatures of 60°C without any problem. (2), integration of Solar photovoltaic panel with DC power heat pump. In order to avoid the electricity conversion lost and enhance the system efficiency, a DC powered heat pump with "variable speed" or "multispeed" will couple with PV system, up to 57% of the energy in cooling and 66% in heating operation will be expected in this project. (3) System Integration, in terms of system design and component coupling, such as the radiant ceiling, pumping system and the PV powered heat pump, will be performed.
- WP5. Intelligent Automation Unit "This WP aims to develop an Intelligent Automation Unit (IAU) Platform together with a low cost novel monitoring system which is a combination of distributed fixed sensor network and an autonomous mobile Robot. The integration of robot, which is always moving around and collecting data and offering service to visitors, not only brings a user oriented monitoring(better quality), but also enhance the building security with the integrated acoustic event detection system. On the other hand, receiving the collected data from the sensor network, IAU will evaluate all the variables giving the strategy that fulfils the thermostat settings with the minimum
cost/impact. A Thermal Dynamics Modeling, calibrated with monitoring data, will be used in the optimization process performed by the IAU. The system performs a optimization calculation and executes the corresponding control, the result is that, the system will exploit the renewable energy and the inertia of the building which serves as a large thermal storage as much as possible, reduce the cost by load shifting, switch on the heating or cooling system more accurately in terms of time and temperature within a acceptable range ( e.g. before the commercial building open, the HVAC starts up to adjust the comfort, when the tariff is lower, the system may also start heating or cooling …) The partial load behavior of the HVAC existing equipment will be investigated in detail and integrated to the IAU. The dependence of the HVAC equipment on variables as outdoor temperature will be monitored and taken as inputs."
- WP6. Operation and Maintenance This WP aims at the development of the solution to automatically identify failures and inefficient system performance in operation of HVAC equipment and systems, foresee the possible problem and alert the building operator to perform advance maintenance, thus, systems can be fixed sooner, time of operating in failure or inefficient modes and energy consumption can be reduced, interruption can be avoided or shortened; the system even may have a better function like automatic maintenance. Building security monitoring for aggression detection could also be integrated into the system. The developed Web based platform that obtains data from sensor and IAM can provide user-friendly access to the data, can assist building operators to ensure proper equipment operation by: (a) easily-viewable graphic displays, (b) plotting of data trends, (c), comparison of actual and modeled building operations,(d), analysis of building operating data received from a IAM to determine possible equipment malfunctions., etc.
- WP7. Demonstration The objectives of this demonstration work package are following: To apply the EcoShopping energy efficient retrofitting approaches to demo; To monitor the performances of the retrofitted buildings over a 1 year period; To validate the EcoShopping final solutions against the parameters of control.
- WP8. Dissemination and training activities The objectives of dissemination and training activities work package are following: To optimize the value of project results and enhance the respective impact: comprising activities relating to the training and demonstration, dissemination of the project results as well as the integration of the results into training systems and practices at local and European level. To ensure knowledge exchange and a permanent communication, interaction and collaboration between project partners within the consortium, comprising all issues relating to the management of project internal knowledge and knowledge exchange. To demonstrate the profitable of the investment implementation of the EcoShopping solution. To facilitate links and networking between partners and external stakeholders, projects and networks: comprising all issues relating to external knowledge exchange and PPP partnership and building a new germinal market of innovative start-ups, solutions and services of EcoShopping for the construction sector. To support the duplication, extension and exploitation of EcoShopping.
