This study investigated the effects of two whole-day ambient lighting interventions applied in living rooms on the objective and subjective sleep quality in older adults. Both lighting interventions ...were designed to apply a direct/indirect ambient illumination that delivered a high illuminance level (500lux) in the morning (8:00–12:00). The illumination was gradually dimmed throughout the day and reached 100lux in the evening (after 20:00). One lighting condition (L1) provided a constant Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) of 2700 K. In the other lighting condition (L2), the CCT changed in a range of 6500 K – 2700 K from the morning to the evening. Twenty-one older adults (mean age = 78.81, 16 female) from three residential communities participated in a counterbalanced crossover study. Participants were exposed to each lighting intervention for nine days. Using 41-day actigraphy and standard questionnaires, objective and subjective data of sleep were collected before, during, and after exposure to interventions. Both interventions significantly increased sleep duration at night compared to the baseline with significantly more increase after L2 intervention. Additionally, the L2 intervention significantly improved sleep efficiency and sleep quality and decreased sleep disturbance, sleep-related impairment, and sleep onset latency compared to Baseline and L1. These results provided promising evidence that daily exposure to a whole-day lighting scheme that follows the light/dark cycle could improve sleep quality in older adults; thereby it could be considered as an effective design solution in creating healthy living environments for the senior population.
•Lighting in living rooms significantly impacts sleep quality in older adults.•Varying illuminance levels improves nighttime sleep durations in older adults.•Tuning spectra promotes the effectiveness of a whole-day lighting scheme on sleep.
Many countries have proposed plans on distributed energy systems. However, distributed energy systems still can be improved in system optimization design methods, new-type load, and application ...scenarios. Therefore, a novel distributed energy system is developed combining solar energy utilization with hybrid energy storage technology, i.e., heat storage and electricity storage. Secondly, with primary energy saving rate, carbon dioxide equivalent emission reduction rate, and annual cost per unit supply area as objectives, an integration optimization method considering equipment configuration and operation strategy is adopted. Then, considering different community types and scales, 12 nearly zero energy community scenarios with electric vehicles as a new-type load are designed. Comparative analysis is conducted on the proposed system, comparing with separated production system and in different scenarios. The results show the scenario with 50% public buildings possesses considerable energy saving (53.1%), environmentally protection (56.4%), and economy (50.1 CNY/m2). The proportion of public buildings mainly influences primary energy saving rate (21.0%), followed by annual cost per unit supply area 17.7 (CNY/m2), finally carbon emission reduction (9.1%). The residential community with 196800 m2 building scale perform brilliantly. These findings worth popularization and application in the developing nearly zero energy communities.
•A novel distributed energy system is proposed considering hybrid energy storage.•The co-optimization method improves the primary energy saving rate by 24.0%.•Community with 50% public and 50% residential buildings has optimal energy saving and carbon reduction.•Community with 196800 m2 has marked CO2 reduction (49.8%) and economy (56.5 CNY/m2).
Against the background of large-scale urbanisation and rural land expropriation, rural resettlement residential housing has been built to accommodate local rural residents in the peripheral areas of ...China. To explore the context-specific policy implications for improving neighbourhood satisfaction (NS) of residents in rural resettlement residential communities (RRRCs), this paper examines the determinants of NS, and their spatial effects, in rural resettlement residential neighbourhoods using Suqian, in Jiangsu Province, as a case study. This study contributes to the current literature in two ways: it constitutes the first attempt to examine NS among RRRCs; second, our spatial model helps to gain further understanding of horizontal and vertical spatial dependence effects. Our results indicate that income, gender, age, family structure, number of years living in a community, transport and architectural age all have significant effects on NS in RRRCs.
With more distributed energy resources penetrated into the residential community, nanogrid based peer-to-peer (P2P) energy market has rapidly emerged over recent years. Due to the complexities on the ...decision-making process of each market participant, an efficient, fair and beneficial oriented bidding strategy is thus necessary. In this article, a two-stage bidding strategy for P2P trading of nanogrid is proposed. To overcome the limitations of traditional methods, in the first stage, a supply-demand relationship considered two-step price predictor, which aims to promote the usage of local renewable energy, is formulated to provide the guidance on transaction adjustment. In the second stage, trading preference based simultaneous game-theoretic approach is fully introduced, which can optimize the market equilibrium and then increase the social welfare of the P2P market. Additionally, to mitigate the possible failure of price matching, value-at-risk is implemented through the trading process as a risk hedging tool. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy, usages of local renewable energy, economic benefits and success rates of transaction is compared against the traditional method for various cases.
The impacts of improving energy efficiency of housing units on designing carbon neutral grid-connected residential communities in Saudi Arabia are evaluated in the study summarized in this paper. The ...analysis utilizes both PV systems and wind turbines as on-site renewable power technologies to achieve the carbon neutrality status for residential communities. Various energy efficiency levels for the housing units that make the residential communities are considered in the analysis. For this study, the design of carbon neutral communities is performed using a cost optimization approach to account for the cost of on-site power generation as well as the grid electricity prices. The analysis indicated that while the carbon neutral residential communities can be achieved in all Saudi regions, their cost-effectiveness depend on the solar and wind resources as well as on the grid electricity prices and the installation costs of solar arrays and wind turbines. In addition, the analysis has indicated the cost-effectiveness of carbon neutral communities can be significantly improved including a reduction of capitals cost by more than 50% when electrical loads for the communities are lowered through energy efficiency actions on individual housing units.
Hurricanes are one of the major causes of damage and loss to residential wooden buildings in the United States. The study of hurricane-imposed risks to residential wooden buildings is, therefore, a ...fundamental step to mitigate these damages and losses. Within this context, a probabilistic methodology is provided for the fragility analysis of residential wooden buildings. Two damage mechanisms are considered in this methodology, excessive dynamic wind pressure and impact from windborne debris. Unlike existing frameworks, the methodology defines the geometric configuration as well as the required extension of the neighboring buildings to estimate the damage from both mechanisms. A case study illustrates the methodology on residential communities composed of archetype gable-roof buildings. Ten construction cases are defined to cover a range of resistances of building components for both considered damage mechanisms. Three floor-area ratios (FAR) are also considered. The resulting fragility curves highlight: (1) the effect of the FAR on enhancing the performance of residential buildings due to the effect of shielding; and (2) the significance of windborne debris in increasing the estimated hurricane risk. The estimated fragility curves can be used to directly model residential buildings in community resilience frameworks.
•A methodology for the risk and fragility analysis of wooden buildings is presented.•Damage from windborne debris is considered in the developed methodology.•Fragility curves for archetype gable-roof buildings are presented.•The significance of windborne debris and floor-area ratio are highlighted.•The estimated fragility curves can be used in community resilience frameworks.
The increasing penetration of distributed renewable energy and electric vehicles (EV) in local microgrids/residential-community has brought a great challenge to balancing system stability and ...economic benefits. This paper proposes a decentralized framework based on an efficient federated deep reinforcement learning method for plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) fleet charging management in a residential community, which is equipped with a photovoltaic and battery energy storage system and connected to a local transformer. Firstly, the framework of PEV charging management is described as a virtual EV charging station coordinating charging tasks through sharing public information with distributed agents. Then, an individual preference model of PEV is developed considering heterogenous PEV charging anxiety, battery degradation, and collective penalty. Subsequently, we propose an attention-weighted federated soft-actor-critic method to efficiently seek the co-ordinational scheduling of the PEV fleet charging in a distributed way, where scalability and privacy protection can be ensured with attention-based information sharing. Finally, a real-world case study is conducted to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach.
•The energy needs of a mixed mode community (overall area 640,000 m2) are investigated.•Photovoltaics, Solar thermal, storage tanks and borehole thermal energy storage are used.•A solar fraction of ...nearly 90% is achieved in the fifth year of simulated operation.•Considering the PV, the neighborhood could generate 20% more energy than consumption.
This paper explores a solar mixed-use community and its potential towards achieving net-zero energy status. This mixed-use community combines residential and commercial/institutional buildings. Energy performance of this neighbourhood is estimated in terms of energy consumption and generation potential by means of building integrated PV systems. A solar thermal collector system combined with a borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) is designed to investigate the impact on the overall performance of the neighbourhood. The design of solar thermal collectors and the sizing of short-term thermal energy storage is based on the analysis of the thermal loads for heating and domestic hot water in each district of the community.
The results of the performance of the thermal collectors and BTES align with existing communities, which employ similar technologies. The results indicate that implementing energy efficiency measures together with PV systems, allows the neighbourhood to generate around 70% of its total energy consumption. The implementation of thermal collectors and seasonal storage, in this high-energy performance neighbourhood, leads to a net positive energy status.
With ongoing urban revolution, Chinese cities are experiencing an influx of migrants, whose integration into urban society becomes an unprecedented challenge. Using a recent survey in Shanghai and ...adopting a multilevel multinomial logistic model, this paper studies perceptions of social integration, comparing local residents with migrants. While migrants and local residents have very different perceptions of social integration, both individual-level factors and community-level factors such as residential segregation shape perceptions of social integration, and they shape migrants and local residents differently. In particular, residential segregation, especially migrant population size, tends to reinforce perceptions of social exclusion, which imposes challenges on social integration.
随着城市革命的持续铺展，中国城市正在经历外来人口涌入潮，他们融入城市社会成为了一 项前所未有的挑战。本文利用最近在上海进行的一项调査并采用多层次多项式逻辑模型，通 过对当地居民与外来人口进行比较，研宄了人们对社会融合的看法。虽然外来人口和当地居 民对社会融合的看法截然不同，但个人层面的因素以及居住隔离等社区层面的因素影响了人 们对社会融合的感知，并以不同方式塑造了外来人口和当地居民。具体而言，居住隔离，特 别是外来人口规模，往往会加剧社会排斥感，这对社会融合构成了挑战。
The COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly has a great impact on the world economy, especially the urban economy. It is urgent to study the environmental pathogenic factors and transmission route of it. We ...want to discuss the relationship between the urban living environment and the number of confirmed cases at the community scale, and examine the driving forces of community infection (e.g., environment, ecology, convenience, livability, and population density). Besides, we hope that our research will help make our cities more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. 650 communities with confirmed COVID-19 cases in Wuhan were selected as the research objects. We utilize deep learning semantic segmentation technology to calculate the Visible Green Index (VGI) and Sky View Factor (SVF) of street view and use Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to study the driving forces of pandemic situation. Temperature and humidity information recorded by sensors was also used for urban sensing. We find that the more SVF has a certain inhibitory effect on the virus transmission, but contrary to our intuitive perception, higher VGI has a certain promotion effect. Also, the structural equation model constructed in this paper can explain the variance of 28.9% of the number of confirmed cases, and results (path coef.) demonstrate that residential density of community (0.517) is a major influencing factor for pandemic cases, whereas convenience of community living (0.234) strongly influence it. Communities with good suitability of community human settlement (e.g., construction time, price) are safer in the face of pandemic events. Does the influence of SVF and VGI on the results of the pandemic situation mean that sunlight can effectively block the spread of the virus? This spatial heterogeneity in different communities is helpful for us to explore the environmental transmission route of COVID-19.
•Contrary to our intuitive understanding, higher VGI has a facilitative effect on SARS-CoV-2 transmission.•The structural equation model in this paper could explain 28.7% of the number of confirmed cases.•Sunlight can prevent the spread of the virus to some extent.•Communities with good building conditions and suitable environment are safer in the face of pandemic.
