Currently there is intense research activity to improve energy efficiency in buildings. School buildings are among the most numerous of public buildings in Europe, most of them built several decades ...ago. This paper analyses the inclusion of good energy efficiency practices within a school buildings renovation and modernization programme as an opportunity to improve their energy performance, with a reduced cost of upgrading the buildings. It is developed within the framework of a regional programme to renovate the stock of school buildings in the South of Spain mild climate zone, which amount to more than 4500 schools, as representative of mild Mediterranean climate area with approximately 87,000 schools. It studies the impact of a set of affordable, passive refurbishment solutions to improve the envelope of school buildings (insulation, shading and glazing) in a reference baseline building model. The results show relatively low energy demands compared with those reported in equivalent schools in other climates, 19.6 kWh/m2 for cooling and 11.1 kWh/m2 for heating. A high potential for energy efficiency improvement, with savings up to 17.7% for heating and up to 15.9% for cooling is obtained by combining affordable passive actions with an investment cost of 146 €/m2.
•Passive refurbishment actions to improve Mediterranean school buildings efficiency.•A catalogue of actions on the building envelope analysed over a school design widely repeated.•Potential savings percentage up to 17.7 for heating and up to 15.9 for cooling.•Better improvement measures combination investment cost of 146 euros per square meter and execution in two months.•Potential carbon dioxide emissions savings of 9.5 tons per year and building.
The recent pandemic due to SARS-CoV-2 has brought to light the need for strategies to mitigate contagion between human beings. Apart from hygiene measures and social distancing, air ventilation ...highly prevents airborne transmission within enclosed spaces. Among others, educational environments become critical in strategic planning to control the spread of pathogens and viruses amongst the population, mainly in cold conditions. In the event of a virus outbreak – such as COVID or influenza – many school classrooms still lack the means to guarantee secure and healthy environments.
The present review examines school contexts that implement air ventilation strategies to reduce the risk of contagion between students. The analysed articles present past experiences that use either natural or mechanical systems assessed through mathematical models, numerical models, or full-scale experiments. For naturally ventilated classrooms, the studies highlight the importance of the architectural design of educational spaces and propose strategies for aeration control such as CO2-based control and risk-infection control. When it comes to implementing mechanical ventilation in classrooms, different systems with different airflow patterns are assessed based on their ability to remove airborne pathogens considering parameters like the age of air and the generation of airflow streamlines. Moreover, studies report that programmed mechanical ventilation systems can reduce risk-infection during pandemic events.
In addition to providing a systematic picture of scientific studies in the field, the findings of this review can be a valuable reference for school administrators and policymakers to implement the best strategies in their classroom settings towards reducing infection risks.
In modern societies people spend over 90% of their time indoors. Students spending more time at school than any other building except at home highlights the importance of providing comfortable indoor ...thermal conditions in these buildings. Thermal comfort since has been related to productivity and well-being and energy conservation in schools, has gained importance in recent years. This paper presents an overview of thermal comfort field surveys in educational buildings over the last five decades. The studies are reviewed in two sections; the first covering the field study methodologies including the objective and subjective surveys, and the second reviewing study results based on the climate zone, educational stage, and the applied thermal comfort approach. Confounding parameters have been discussed to outline priorities for the future research agenda in this field. Reviewed studies have assessed the thermal environment in classrooms compared to common thermal comfort standards. Most of the studies concluded that students׳ thermal preferences were not in the comfort range provided in the standards. Ventilation as an essential determinant of indoor air quality and thermal comfort has been highlighted in most studies. The wide disparity in thermal neutralities underlines the need for micro-level thermal comfort studies.
Greenhouse gases emission as well as total energy consumption in buildings of public importance, such as schools, municipal buildings, health care centers, can be significantly reduced by increasing ...buildings? energy efficiency. Buildings? energy consumption adds up to 37% of total energy consumption in the EU countries. In the Republic of Serbia this amount is significantly higher, about 50%. School buildings are considered as one of the most diverse structures from the point of energy-efficient design and construction. The main aim of this paper is to determine the most appropriate settings for possible improvements in energy efficiency and temperature comfort inside a typical primary school classroom in Serbia. The energy efficiency analysis was performed during the heating season for the naturally ventilated primary school classroom located in the eastern Serbia region. The analysis was performed using novel CFD model, suggested in this paper. The suggested model was used to solve two hypothetical scenarios. The first scenario simulates the temperature field in classroom with current energy characteristic envelope of the school building. The calculated numerical data from the first scenario were compared with in-situ measurements values of temperature and wall heat fluxes and showed satisfying accuracy. The second scenario was simulated to indicate possible improvements, which would allow energy consumption decrease and thermal quality enhancement. The analyzed results, calculated using the suggested numerical model under the second scenario conditions, showed that using appropriate set of measures, it is possible to obtain desired temperature comfort levels without need for increase in the building energy consumption.
The special issue “A Synthesis of Systematic Review Research on Emerging Learning Environments and Technologies” edited by Drs. Florence Martin, Vanessa Dennen, and Curtis Bonk has assembled a ...noteworthy collection of systematic review articles, each focusing on a different aspect of emerging learning technologies. In this conclusion, we focus on these evidence-based reviews and their practical implications for practitioners as well as future researchers. While recognizing the merits of these reviews, we conclude our analysis by encouraging readers to consider conducting educational design research to address serious problems related to teaching, learning, and performance, collaborating more closely with teachers, administrators, and other practitioners in tackling these problems, and always striving to make a difference in the lives of learners around the world.
Introduction. The co-authors address current trends in the architectural design of inclusive schools. Their mission is to maximize the social involvement and integration of disabled children into ...groups of kids. The purpose of this research is to identify guidelines for designing inclusive schools and to make recommendations for the design of inclusive schools that conduct adaptation events. Materials and methods. The co-authors have used methods of comparative analysis and synthesis of foreign and Russian research, literary and design materials; findings of sociological surveys; a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses medicine, social science, and legal norms, that influence the guidelines for designing inclusive schools. Results. The research is focused on developing guidelines for designing inclusive schools and recommendations on the design of inclusive schools whose administration conducts adaptation events for children with minor disabilities and a normal level of intelligence, the vision acuity of, at least, 0.4 diopters, the hearing impairment of 26 to 40 dB, minor muscle-skeleton disorders, including wheelchair users, capable of getting around on their own. These results may be taken advantage of by architects, designing inclusive schools; they can also be taught at universities of architecture. Conclusions. The co-authors make recommendations for the design of inclusive schools designated for particular categories of disabled persons. The analysis of problems in the context of architectural and space-planning design of inclusive school buildings will allow to improve their structure and study their typology with a view to further development. The development of inclusive education, which is also regarded from the standpoint of architectural and space-planning design, draws human attention to the problem of responsibility for disabled children that must be be assumed by the society and the state.
With new degrees of freedom to achieve full control of the optical wavefront, metasurfaces could overcome the fabrication embarrassment faced by the metamaterials. In this paper, a broadband hologram ...using metasurface consisting of elongated nanoapertures array with different orientations has been experimentally demonstrated. Owing to broadband characteristic of the polarization-dependent scattering, the performance is verified at working wavelength ranging from 405 nm to 914 nm. Furthermore, the tolerance to the fabrication errors, which include the length and width of the elongated aperture, the shape deformation and the phase noise, has been theoretically investigated to be as large as 10% relative to the original hologram. We believe the method proposed here is promising in emerging applications such as holographic display, optical information processing and lithography technology etc.
This paper emphasises the attribute of Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) in school (re) design by extending the research toward genuine participation and evaluation. It aims to re-conceptualise ...“child's participation” through exploring its relationship with POE by observing child-built environment connection and by demonstrating how children engage with the problems of school design. This empirically grounded research presents eight workshops with three different schools in Albania. It explores the process, outcomes, challenges, and opportunities during the active involvement of a total of 502 children aged 10–14 years old. The research incorporates a multiplicity of techniques from both creative and evaluative methods: essays, wish poem, drawing, model making, poster design, visual/POE questionnaire and walk-through are some that ensure a comprehensive achievement of children in the process. The study confirms the utility of participation in school design as a tool to propose child-oriented spaces. Within the results, six design concepts of the desired school building of children are identified. These are flexibility, horizontality, campus-like environment, transparency, accessibility, and ecological concept.
We propose a participation language based on the experience, perception, imagination, and active involvement of the children in the learning environments. It concludes that children participation builds upon a spatial experience which lies on the child-school relationship. Language is dynamic and allows researchers and designer to edit and annotate whenever needed, but by always referring to the school of children active and present in participation. It emphasises the POE-participation connection and to further open the discourse of participation to the Albanian public.
•Participation and POE concepts provide a language for (re) designing schools.•Argues flexibility, horizontality, transparency, accessibility & ecology principles.•Verifies diverse methods’ effectiveness in child-research participatory process.•POE-participation togetherness fills the school design expectations-performance gap
•School buildings stock cataloguing method.•Replicable guidelines useful to the Public Administration for school building energy renovation.•Economic investment per student estimated equal to € ...5.060,0.
In this article we deal with the energy renovation of existing school buildings, one of the most relevant and current issue concerning Italian public buildings.
The necessity of a re-alignment with the European performance levels, achievable through a renovation of the school buildings stock, of which almost 90% is more than 30 years old, finds the two main obstacles in the lack of a full awareness of the current state of integrity of buildings and in the absence of an effective energy retrofit planning.
The aim of this study is to define the most promising renovation strategies applicable to all the school building in Lecco municipality, from both the economy and the energy point of view, through the development of an analysis method, repeatable and applicable to most realities, that allows optimizing and simplifying the energy analysis. The presented research is based on the classification and analysis of the study sample, consisting of 38 school buildings that differ in educational level, age of construction and typological design. The methodology developed allows dividing the sampled schools in homogeneous clusters, each one represented by a reference building, whose energy analysis makes it possible to define the best renovation strategy in terms of cost/benefit.
The results obtained provide replicable guidelines useful to the Public Administration in planning of energy retrofit interventions, in defining the total investment amounts and the consequent raising of necessary investments. Specifically the total investment would amount to € 62.971.530, with a calculated economic investment per student equal to € 5.060,0.
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