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A Zero-Emissions House That Charges Itself and Your Electric Car Too

Architecture firm Snøhetta has put its stamp on some pretty high profile places, with some very high profile projects: The Oslo Opera House, of course, and the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion in New York City. Soon enough, their overhaul of Times Square will cater to the 400,000-plus pedestrians that walk through the site every day. The firm, which has main offices in Oslo, Norway, and New York City, works on some quieter projects too, like this ZEB Pilot House, situated in a less-than-glamorous industrial stretch of Larvik, Norway, some 80 miles south of Oslo. Even though it's out of the limelight, the ZEB house-a collaboration between Snøhetta and the Research Center on Zero Emission Buildings - could have a major impact on residential architecture going forward: Not only is it a zero emissions house, it's a "plus house," meaning it actually produces excess energy. It's enough that an electric car could drive for 12,500 miles on the surplus energy from the ZEB.

Most of this happens through the solar panel roof, which is tilted at at 19-degree angle towards the southeast, to capture as much light as possible. A 45-degree angle would have actually been the optimum position, said lead architect Anne Cecilie Haug, but that would have made the house cartoonish in scale and difficult to build. Settling on the best angle for capturing light over a long period of time "took all this back and forth with the engineers and us," she says. But the tilted roof can be modified and applied to other buildings in new orientations. A home in Australia, for instance, would need to tilt north. And buildings with different functions might want to capitalize on certain times of day. "An office building would want to harvest more electricity in the middle of the day when everyone's running their computers," Haug says of a building that might want a flatter angle, to catch noon light.

Because solar energy is most efficient when used in real time (when panels are harvesting electricity), the ZEB house is especially enabled by connected home gadgets. Using a smart phone to turn on the washing machine while you're at work means the house can power itself off available daylight, rather than stored energy. Or smart thermostats (with the help of geothermal heating and a heat exchange system connected to the home's gray water recycling) can remember to conserve electricity for Friday nights, to optimize heating when families are home.

Tricked out as it is, the ZEB Pilot House is ultimately designed for people, so Snøhetta was careful to include a series of organic, but still energy-saving touches, like beeswax-laminated aspen wood in the bedrooms. The wax reacts with natural moisture in the air, helping to keep the room temperature steady. The concrete and bricks supporting the solar roof came from the "Norwegian version of eBay" and can naturally trap heat and cool air, conserving some energy from the house's heating and cooling system. "We tried to make an outdoor and indoor situation which felt like real home," Haug says. "It's a very high tech house, but we were working a lot to make it feel homey, make it feel like somewhere you can live."

Crystalline Museum opens in Lyon

It's taken 18 years of brainstorming, errors and achievements for the ambitious Musée des Confluences to come to fruition (see W*172), but the institution has finally opened its doors to the citizens and visitors of Lyon.

Certainly, 'confluence' is an apt term to describe the new structure. Four different museums have merged into one, now boasting a collection of over two million objects where one can find anything, from the skeleton of a camarasaurus to ancient Egyptian cat mummies or an accelerator of particles. This gargantuan cabinet of curiosities has been revisited by a multi-disciplinary team of experts to become a showcase for the history of human knowledge.

Designed by Vienna-based Coop Himmelb(l)au and seen as the crown jewel of a large urban development in Lyon's former harbour area, the museum sits at the tip of the peninsula marking the confluence of two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône. Both exceptional and challenging, the location is hindered by the A7 highway that cuts this part of Lyon off from the rest of the city, but thankfully not for much longer: in about a decade infrastructure will be both adapted and introduced to make this portion of the city more accessible.

Dynamism and fluidity are central to Coop Himmelb(l)au's work, and the new museum is no exception. Principal architect Wolf D Prix explains that the 180m long building is meant as a passage from architecture to nature, from the entrance plaza to the vast garden and the converging rivers.

Three major elements - the Socle, the Crystal and the Cloud - unite to form a complex while serving different functions. The generously-glazed, light-filled Crystal acts both as the museum lobby and a covered public space, pitched as a vibrant meeting place set to attract all kinds of visitors. The Gravity Well supporting this 33m high structure makes its roof look like an enormous whirlpool of steel and glass.

Meanwhile, the aluminium-clad Cloud floats above the ground and contains exhibition and event spaces, as well as the panoramic roof terrace complete with a gourmet café. Both the Cloud and the Crystal rest upon the concrete Socle, partly embedded in the ground and housing the auditorium, workshops and service areas. While the public is yet to have the last word on the building's bold look, the museum team has already had quite a few occasions to appreciate the functionality of Coop Himmelb(l)au's design.

TailorCrete to Revolutionize Concrete Fabrication

Concrete construction has been an important part of architectural practice since the Roman Empire. Extremely malleable, fluid concrete is capable of being poured into almost any conceivable form. In theory, this makes it an ideal building material. In practice, however, creating complex forms out of concrete is extremely inefficient. Pouring on sight requires formwork that is painstakingly made by hand, and precast concrete is usually limited by orthogonal molds. Concrete has become restricted to a few simple forms that are easy and cheap to produce when, in many cases, a building would benefit from concrete casting that is optimized for its structural and economical needs. How do we make such optimization feasible? This is the question that the EU sponsored TailorCrete has attempted to answer. A research consortium lasting for four years, TailorCrete is exploring new technologies that could make non-standard concrete structures commonplace.

TailorCrete is led by the Danish Technological Institute, and involves 14 partners such as Czech Technical University, ETH Zurich, and Chalmers University of Technology. The project explores a variety of construction technologies, such as alternative formworks, and robotics. The goal, according to the TailorCrete website is to "replace the use of traditional formwork and thus enable greater flexibility in producing singular concrete structures with different geometric designs. Through the development and use of self-compacting concrete with robots, a link will be created between digital design and the fabrication of materials and components and ultimately to the on-site construction processes."

Pavement Technologies to Clear Snow and Ice from Runways

Alireza Sassani turned a switch and sent 60 volts of electricity into a small block of concrete. A few minutes later the Iowa State University doctoral student took some measurements and found the block's surface temperature had risen from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 189 degrees.

Next, Therin Young stepped up to the demonstration table and carefully squeezed drops of green-colored water on top of another set of small concrete blocks. The drops beaded on the concrete and, with the help of a little tilting by the master's student, rolled right off the edge.

And then Halil Ceylan opened a walk-in freezer and showed off a pile of snow from one of Iowa's winter storms. Behind the snow was a 2½-foot by 3½-foot concrete slab that was wet, but drying. Some 45 minutes earlier, that slab was buried in the snow.

All three technologies - electrically conductive concrete, nanostructured superhydrophobic coatings and hydronic heated pavements - are designed to quickly, economically and sustainably clear snow and ice from airport runways.

"These new technologies could prevent flight delays and keep airports accessible," said Ceylan, an Iowa State associate professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering and director of the Program for Sustainable Pavement Engineering and Research at Iowa State's Institute for Transportation.

"This provides a safe working platform for airport personnel and passengers," he said. "And it's environmentally friendly - airports don't have to use tons of de-icing salts. This also translates into reduced emissions and costs because airports don't have to treat the wastewater associated with de-icing of airport pavements, which is otherwise mandatory."

Improved Planning for the Evacuation of Buildings

A simulation software from Siemens can analyze people's behavior in emergency situations. The software known as "Crowd Control" calculates how individuals or crowds will behave and move in emergencies. The program allows experts to observe and optimize evacuation and rescue measures in advance and in real time. Making such improvements is one of the most complex tasks that security officers have to perform.

Crowd Control can determine in advance how thousands of people will move, and it does so at a rate that is ten times faster than real life. This improves the planning of buildings and allows security personnel to be trained more easily. Siemens offers building evacuation simulations as an independent consulting service. This service encompasses the entire range of analytical tasks, extending from data collection and data preparation to the generation of reports and the interpretation of the results.

One of the reasons why it is so difficult to plan building evacuations in advance is that conditions change very quickly and dynamically during emergencies such as fires or shootings. In addition, it's hard to estimate how many people are actually present at an event and whether any of them fall into special categories (e.g. elderly, children, disabled). Moreover, passages can be blocked by objects and temporary construction sites can prevent people from using emergency exits.

The consultants from Siemens work together with the customers and their architects and planners to develop a variety of scenarios, for which they then use Crowd Control to calculate and visualize the resulting effects. Among other things, experts can take different types of people and blocked passages into account.

Innovative, Lower Cost Sensors and Controls Yield Better Energy Efficiency

Regulating comfort in small commercial buildings could become more efficient and less expensive thanks to an innovative low-cost wireless sensor technology being developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Buildings are responsible for about 40 percent of the energy consumed in the United States. Studies indicate that advanced sensors and controls have the potential to reduce the energy consumption of buildings by 20-30 percent.

"It is widely accepted that energy-consuming systems such as heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) units in buildings are under, or poorly, controlled causing them to waste energy," said Patrick Hughes, director of ORNL's Building Technologies Program. "Buildings could increase their energy efficiency if control systems had access to additional information."

Collecting data such as outside air and room temperature, humidity, light level, occupancy and pollutants is currently cost prohibitive, whether the information is gathered by inexpensive conventional sensors that must be wired, or by using today's expensive $150-300 per node wireless sensors.

ORNL's new wireless sensor prototype could reduce costs to $1-10 per node by leveraging advanced manufacturing techniques such as additive roll-to-roll manufacturing. This process enables electronics components like circuits, sensors, antennae, and photovoltaic cells and batteries to be printed on flexible plastic substrates (base materials). The nodes can be installed without wires using a peel-and-stick adhesive backing.

"If commercially available at the target price point, there would be endless application possibilities where the installed cost to improve the control of energy-consuming systems would pay for itself through lower utility bills in only a few years," Hughes said.

The ultra-low power smart sensors collect and send data to a receiver, which can capture data from many different peel-and-stick nodes and provide the information to the energy-consuming system. The more information received, the better the building's energy management.

Both new construction and retrofitted buildings can benefit from ORNL's smart sensors.

"This technology provides the information that enables ongoing continuous commissioning, fault detection and diagnosis, and service organization notifications when needed, ensuring optimal building system operations throughout their service life," said ORNL's Teja Kuruganti, principal investigator on the low-cost wireless sensors project.

Green Building Associations Working to Align Standards

Several groups that work for sustainable buildings are collaborating on aligning green building codes and standards. The International Code Council (ICC), the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IES), and ASHRAE are now collaborating on the next editions of the the International Green Construction Code (IgCC), ASHRAE Standard 189.1, and the LEED standard.

The collaborative work will result in a streamlined application of the code, said IES director of technology Rita Harrold.

"Different partners have different strengths," Harrold said. "Our organizations working together will result in harmonization of technical, administrative and compliance expertise to produce a single green code, simplifying the choice among design and code options for the using community."

The IES is an industry group composed of lighting manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers, designers, architects, consultants, electrical and building contractors, as well as people working with lighting through government, education, utilities, and energy services.

International Code Council (ICC) chief executive officer Dominic Sims noted that the collaborative process "will make it easier for owners, designers, builders and code officials to deliver sustainable, high-performing buildings."

The ICC, with help from cooperating sponsors AIA and ASTM International, develops the International Green Construction Code. Goals for the IgCC include creating more sustainable buildings by reducing buildings' energy usage and carbon footprint, preserving natural and material resources, and creating healthy spaces.

ASHRAE represents heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration engineers. Its members "focus on building systems, energy efficiency, indoor air quality, refrigeration and sustainability within the industry," according to the group's web site. The group is currently revising Standard 189.1.

"We are working to align new versions of Standard 189.1-the Standard for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings-and the IgCC into one regulatory tool," said ASHRAE president Tom Phoenix. "This agreement also seeks to align the LEED program with the new code to ensure a streamlined, effective set of regulatory and above-code options for jurisdictions across the country."

Similarly, the US Green Building Council's LEED standard will more closely align with other standards after a cooperative revision.

"This partnership leverages the unique strengths of world class organizations collaborating in an unprecedented way," said USGBC chief of engineering Brendan Owens. "Building designers and operators know the benefits of integrated design and planning very well-we've taken our cue from them and will create a system where the whole is substantially more effective than the sum of its individual parts."

See more at: http://sourceable.net/green-building-associations-working-align-standards/

Concrete: solid, dependable, obstinate - and self-healing

Half of everything that gets made gets made from concrete. In terms of usage, it is the single most popular material on the planet - if you want to build a dam, a bridge, an airport or a city, this is the material of choice, yet very few people will admit to liking the stuff. No matter how beautiful they find the Sydney Opera House, how sublime they find the Millau viaduct or how awestruck they are by visiting the Hoover dam, concrete's image never seems to improve. However, perceptions may now be changing as new forms - such as self-healing concrete - are being brought into production.

Concrete is poured into existence, which is what makes it such versatile and liberating stuff. Build a mould for your structure, pour in the concrete and hey presto, you have something that can last for thousands of years. For example, the dome of the Pantheon in Rome was built from concrete 2,000 years ago.

The hey presto bit is interesting. During the pour, a mixture of cement, stones and water hardens to become synthetic rock. It is not a process of drying out; instead it undergoes a series of chemical reactions via the formation of a gel. Gels are semi-solid and wobbly types of matter. The jelly served at children's parties is a gel, it doesn't flow like a liquid because it has an internal skeleton which prevents the liquid moving around. In the case of jelly this is created by the gelatin. In the case of cement the internal skeleton is made up of calcium silicate hydrate fibrils, which are created as a result of the chemical reaction with the water. The gel formed inside the cement is constantly changing and, as the fibrils grow and meet, they mesh together forming bonds and locking in more and more of the water, until it becomes fully solid.

Modern concrete is reinforced with steel rods, which gives it architectural versatility and robustness. You'll see them sticking out of all construction sites during a concrete pour. Getting their design right is vital if you want a bridge or a dam to be able to withstand bending forces and shocks.

As with any recipe, if you get the ingredients or process wrong, then you get a mess. In the case of concrete though, the problems can go undiscovered, because on the surface all concrete looks roughly the same. This can lead to catastrophe many years after the structure is built. The extent of the devastation due to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was blamed on shoddy construction and poor quality of concrete: according to government figures, an estimated 250,000 buildings collapsed, killing more than 300,000 people and making a million more homeless.

See more at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/

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