Building energy consumption accounts for 30%–45% of the global energy demand. With an ever-increasing world population, it has now become essential to minimize the energy consumption for the future of the environment. One of the most crucial aspects in this regard is the utilization of sensing and environmental monitoring technologies in buildings as these technologies provide stakeholders, such as owners, designers, managers, and occupants, with important information regarding the energy performance, safety and cost-effectiveness of the building. With the global sensors market value predicted to exceed $190 billion by 2021 and the number of sensors deployed worldwide forecasted to reach the ‘1 Trillion’ mark by 2025, a state-of-the-art review of various commercially-viable sensor devices and the wide range of communication technologies that complement them is highly desirable. This paper provides an insight into various sensing and environmental monitoring technologies commonly deployed in buildings by surveying different sensor technologies, wired and wireless communication technologies, and the key selection parameters and strategies for optimal sensor placement. In addition, we review the key characteristics and limitations of the most prominent battery technologies in use today, different energy harvesting sources and commercial off-the-shelf solutions, and various challenges and future perspectives associated with the application of sensing and environmental monitoring technologies within buildings.

Highlights • Aggregated set of hygrothermal material properties for hemp-lime • Effect of discretization on component level moisture buffering • Whole building hygrothermal performance with EnergyPlus and IES • Effective moisture capacitance model to represent relative humidity buffering • Moisture admittance approach with resistance and capacitance to determine zone moisture buffering ABSTRACT Hemp-lime is a potentially useful building material with relatively low embodied energy and moderate-to-good thermal performance, coupled with good moisture buffering capacity. However, some uncertainty remains with regards to its in-situ thermal performance and the capability of building energy simulation tools to accurately predict envelope performance and subsequent energy demand of buildings constructed of such vapour-active materials. In this paper we investigate the hygrothermal performance of buildings with walls constructed from hemp-lime. Component-level moisture buffering simulation employing the EnergyPlus simulation tool is found to be within 18% of Wufi Pro analysis and laboratory measurements. The coarseness of component discretization is shown to effect moisture buffering leading to the observation that finer discretization should be employed to improve EnergyPlus HAMT model accuracy. Whole building simulation of the BESTEST building with hemp-lime components indicates that moisture transport inclusion has a large influence on zone relative humidity but little influence on overall heating and cooling demand. A simple effective-capacitance model is able to represent humidity buffering but is less good at representing the response to sudden moisture loading. An additional resistance parameter is added to the model and an IES-ve simulation using this approach is shown to give a close match to the full hygric simulation.

No abstract

No abstract