Journey of American Building Physics: Steps Leading to the Current Scientific Revolution

Abstract

This is an overview of a Key Note lecture; the quote for this lecture is from T.S. Eliot: “We must not cease from exploration and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive, where we began, and, to know the place for the first time”. This quote highlights that the process of scientific development goes in circles, yet each of them goes above the previous circle, building up the ladder of knowledge. Closing one circle and opening the next may be either be a quiet, unnoticeable event or a roaring loud, scientific revolution. Building science (physics) was started about 100 years ago, but only now are we closing its second circle. Perhaps, because of building physics’ role in the fourth industrial revolution, this discipline itself is undergoing a scientific revolution The first industrial revolution was based on steam generated by burning coal, the second was based on petroleum, and the third on electricity and concentrated electricity production. The current one, i.e., the fourth, is based on distributed energy sources combined with information technology.

Towards Characterization of Indoor Environment in Smart Buildings: Modelling PMV Index Using Neural Network with One Hidden Layer

“…. [1][2][3]5,7,[10][11][12][13]22,[27][28][29][30][31][32]34,35,[45][46][47]. The neural networks used in it introduce flexibility to the formulation of models describing comfort.…”

“…Thanks to this, one can talk about a kind of individual approach to the topic, while taking into account a set of features representing a given community. The described gap was noticed some time ago, thanks to which there is currently a flood of publications on this subject [1][2][3]5,7,[10][11][12]22,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][45][46][47]. It is worth quoting the work in [22], in which it is stated that the establishment of an individual thermal comfort evaluation is essential to achieving personalized thermal environment management.…”

“…A team of collaborating authors in the US and Poland address the issue of energy efficiency of modern buildings. The scope of work includes preheating of ventilation air [1][2][3][4], multi-criterial analysis [5,6], the development of an integrated approach, called Environmental Quality Management [7][8][9] in the context of building physics [10,11], fuzzy logic [12] or artificial neural networks [13,14]. The greater focus on neural networks (NNs) is justified by the observation that currently used energy and hygrothermal models are parametric and may not be suitable for application in real-time building of automatic controls [14,15].…”

“…It should also be noted that studies of comfort are not limited to energy consumption, since they also have to reduce incidence rates and increase efficiency [4,11,[35][36][37].…”

Merging Geo-Solar Exergy Storage Technology (GEST) and Environmental Quality Management (EQM): A Practical Solution for NZEB Retrofit

“…Science tells us that new buildings must be designed in a holistic manner [2] and the introduction of IDP (integrated design process [3]) brought the correct platform to do it. The authors suggest that this holistic process be applied to retrofit construction.…”