The building sector consumes about 30% of primary energy worldwide. Life span is an important variable in life cycle assessment (LCA) of buildings. The aim of this study is to make the LCA of containers constructed in a refugee camp in Turkey and to investigate the relationship between life span and consumed energy with CO2 emission values. The proposed model in the study focused on the construction phase of the containers to find energy consumption and emissions for different life span years. Life span years are chosen between 5 and 40 years. Energy and CO2 release factors are defined per square meter. Total life cycle construction and operational energy demand of the post-disaster housing is calculated to be 24.7 GJ/m2. The CO2 intensity of the housing is calculated to be 20.39 kg CO2/m2-year. It is found that energy and emission values are decreasing with the increase of life span of container-type houses constructed in refugee camps in Turkey.
The greatest potential for optimizing the energy efficiency of buildings is in the early design stages. However, in most planning processes energy analysis is conducted shortly before construction when major changes to the design have a high cost impact. The integration of energy performance analysis in the early design stages is therefore highly desirable, but requires suitable tools able to quickly generate results that can help the planner optimize the building design. Parametric design approaches permit the effortless generation of many variants and therefore represent a suitable way of testing different alternatives in the early design stages. Most plug-ins for parametric design software currently rely on dynamic building performance simulation which provides detailed results, but requires computation times ranging from 20 s to 5 min. As optimization processes typically require several thousand simulations, the computation time can quickly amount to days. The approach presented in this paper proposes a real-time energy demand calculation based on a quasi-steady state method defined by the German standard DIN V 18599 which defines the national implementation of the European Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings. The results are verified of tests on three residential reference buildings in Germany in comparison with an accredited commercial software product. An application example indicates the great potential for easy-to-use energy optimization in the early design stages.
In this study, thermal fatigue characteristics of materials used in aerospace structures have been investigated. A new algorithm developed under the finite element analysis software ANSYS is used to determine thermal fatigue characteristics of the specific structures. Safety factor distribution of thin plate with two boundary conditions is given, and associated results are compared. The circular holes are also made in the structure in order to see the effects of nonlinearities, and the distribution of safety factors is obtained and their results are compared as well.
In this paper, the effects of plasma power and plasma gas flow rate on the geometrical dimensions, the shape of plasma flame and temperature distribution in gasification reactor have been investigated. The effects of plasma power and plasma gas flow rate on the geometrical dimensions, shape of plasma flame and temperature distribution in gasification reactor are presented. The plasma pictures at a variety of plasma power ranging from 300 to 4200 W with the range of plasma gas which is air from 50 to 100 L/min are presented. As expected, an increase in power causes the generation of intensive plasma with enhancement of the plasma flame volume. On the other hand, air flow rate is inversely proportional to the volume of the plasma flame. It is observed that both power and air flow rate has a significant effect on plasma flame shape. The spreading shape of plasma flame is observed at low powers. However, the shape of flame is pointed toward its end with an increase in plasma power. Meanwhile, reducing air flow rate causes a change in shape at lower power levels. The interactive influence of air flow rate and plasma power is confirmation of different plasma flow regimes. The temperature measurements confirm the effects of air flow rate and power on plasma flame regime from 1800 to 6000 W power. Increasing power level causes increment in the reactor temperature. The average temperature in the reactor is increased from 480 °C at 1800 W power to 1018 °C at 6000 W power. The flow rate has a reverse effect on magnitude of the temperature. The average temperature in the reactor is reduced from 480 to 348 °C at 1800 W power and 1018 to 918 °C at 6000 W power when the flow rate is increased from 50 to 100 L/min. However, the temperature distribution is more uniform in higher flow rates. It is also related with the shape of plasma. While the magnitude of temperature and its gradient is high in pointed end plasma, the effects are reversed in spreading shape plasma.
Life span is one of the most effective parameter in Life Cycle Assessment of building analysis. The purpose of the study is to display the life span and consumed energy relation with different usage areas of a typical post-disaster container house via Neuro-Fuzzy approach. The proposed Fuzzy model in the study motivated on the construction phase of the containers to estimate total energy use for different life span years. Life span years are chosen between 5 and 40 years. By using Life Cycle Energy Assessment (LCEA) analysis, it is found that energy values are decreasing with the increase in life span of the container house models. The most drastic reduction in energy values has been observed in the first years with respect to the usage areas. Besides the analytical LCEA analysis, an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) modeling approach is used to predict the life span of the container houses. The results of the ANFIS modeling approach have shown promising results. The optimum life span for the CH models has been calculated to be around 16 years. There is a remarkable increase in EE values of the CH having a gross area bigger than 26 m2. It is shown that the Neuro-Fuzzy application is a very viable tool for accurate life span predictions in Life Cycle Assessment studies.
Considerable number of Indian and international studies has focused on the environmental implications of sewage treatment plants. However, not many studies have taken up a comprehensive assessment of the collection phase of the Indian sewage systems. The aim of the present study is to carry out an integrated life-cycle assessment for the collection phase of an Indian wastewater treatment system. The paper develops in the form of a case study for Begusarai sewerage project and attempts to estimate life-cycle air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption for the collection phase of the project. The work consists of developing a life-cycle inventory for pipelines, manholes, pumps and transportation facilities in a typical collection phase, by making use of existing activity data and emission factors from secondary literature (see graphical abstract). Further, the normalized factors for different environmental damage categories are incorporated within the developed inventory to estimate overall life-cycle damage. Initially, the major components for each damage category are identified. For instance, side walls of manholes are major contributors towards PM2.5 emissions while pumping stations are major energy consumers and CO2 emitters. High resource consumption is identified as the major damage category, compared to atmospheric emissions. As larger quantities of water need to be treated owing to increasing water use in the country, a discussion on water–energy nexus is required to estimate the implications of sewage systems.