Heating with Wolves, Cooling with Cacti

Thermo-bio-architectural Framework (ThBA)

Negin Imani, Brenda Vale

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000541908
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Management
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book describes the detailed process behind the development of a comprehensive thermo-bio-architectural framework (the ThBA). This framework systematically connects the thermal performance requirements of a building to relevant solutions found in the natural world. This is the first time that architecture has been connected to biology in this manner. The book provides an in-depth understanding of thermoregulatory strategies in animals and plants and links these to equivalent solutions in architectural design. The inclusion of this fundamental knowledge, along with the systematic process of accessing it, should open up new avenues for the generation of energy efficient and sustainable buildings.

Chapter 1 Building Energy Use and Climate Change

1.1 Climate change

Global warming and consequent climate change is a universal issue that for many people is hard to appreciate as a problem because the link between everyday behaviour and its effect on climate is difficult to see. Only recently have a number of extreme weather events begun to be linked with the effect of changes to the climate, caused by increased concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. The problem in part stems from the fact that many buildings, especially those in the developed world are powered by energy that comes from fossil fuels, and it is the burning of these that has been linked to climate change.

Research has shown that global warming will continue to increase if appropriate measures and policies are not set in place and adhered to by influential industries (Chen 2015). Many countries have set out policies and initiated research for controlling and mitigating the potentially excruciating effects of climate change on human lives. An example is Carbon WatchNZ, a New Zealand (NZ) programme that focuses on the carbon balance of the whole country through measuring greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere (NIWA 2019). The NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE 2019) states, “Approximately 20% of all energy in NZ is consumed in the operation of buildings and around 65–70% of the energy consumed in buildings is in the form of electricity. Buildings use slightly more than half of the electricity produced in NZ.” Because NZ energy has a significant renewable component of total primary energy supply in 2019 (39.5%) (MBIE 2020) and 82.4% of electricity generated that same year (MBIE 2020), this does not seem a great problem. However, globally in 2015, “82% of final energy consumption in buildings was supplied by fossil fuels” (Abergel et al. 2017), and climate change is a global problem not just an NZ problem.

Climate change and global warming are expected to affect several aspects of building performance and this will happen in various ways. Extreme weather events leading to heavy rain could have an impact on building detailing and buildings may need to be placed or repositioned to avoid frequent flooding events. Increase in temperature will also affect building energy use and given buildings last a long time, this may be very different from the energy use predicted when the building was designed.

In the natural world, changes to the climate can lead to extinction, migration and adaptation (if remaining in the same place) of various species. For example, in Mexico climate change has already been linked to the extinction of some species of lizard. “We found a correlation between rate of change in T_raax during winter-spring breeding periods and local extinctions of Sceloporus species” (Sinervo et al. 2010). Climate change is also leading to migration as “A tally of more than 4,000 species from around the world shows that roughly half are on the move” (Welch 2017). It is known that in warmer years, malaria-carrying mosquitoes migrate to higher altitudes, suggesting that “… climate change will, without mitigation, result in an increase of the malaria burden in the densely populated highlands of Africa and South America” (Siraj et al. 2014). When it comes to adaptation, the human species should have no problem surviving since it has already learned to live in most places in the world with the exception of the extreme polar regions. Jenkins et al. (2015) also point out that the slow rate of change to buildings and energy supply infrastructure “…will mean that both building designers and those involved with energy provision have time to respond, even within the context of changing climate and building technology” However, it might still be prudent to design buildings that minimise energy use both now and in the future as part of climate change mitigation. The aim, after all, is to sustain the human way of life.

1.2 Sustainability and climate change

Sustainability is a broad concept that is hard to define but as suggested at the end of the last section, the aim is generally for people to sustain a way of living. This necessitates recognising that humanity lives on the resources of a finite planet with the benefit of external solar energy from the sun. However, this only deals with the environment within which humanity dwells. When people talk about sustainability, they often refer to its three dimensions, these being the economic, social and environmental, often called the three pillars of sustainability (Ortiz et al. 2009). As a result, sustainable design in architecture has been defined as the way quality of life can be improved through the synergistic relationships between the three pillars of sustainability In its turn, building performance can also be evaluated from three perspectives: (1) the requirements of the occupants, (2) economic sense and (3) environmental performance (Leaman et al. 2010). The latter (3) involves evaluation of material and energy flows emanating from the characteristics of buildings (Ltitzkendorf et al. 2005). Resource conservation can be categorised into energy, material, water, and land conservation, of which energy conservation has been regarded as the most important issue affecting the environment (Akadiri et al. 2012). Reduction in energy consumption is also critical as buildings and the construction sector consume nearly 40% of total global energy consumption, a consumption that is rising rather than falling (GlobalABC 2019).

1.2.1 Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD)

Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD) emerged as the way of applying the 1990 Australian concept of Ecologically Sustainable Development to buildings (Gamage and Hyde 2012). The aim was always to integrate the environmental aspects of development with the economic aspects. As an approach towards the development of a sustainable built environment, ESD mainly targets energy consumption reduction (GhaffarianHoseini 2012), since reducing energy demand tends to make economic sense over the life of the building. This has made building energy efficiency the most prominent concept in ESD (Jabareen 2008). As part of being environmentally sustainable, a building needs to minimise the fossil fuel energy used for its construction, operation, and maintenance. Ideally, ESD also needs to minimise the land needed to supply its material resources, whether these be timber, masonry materials, metals or plastics, and the energy bound up in producing these materials. This means an environmentally sustainable building is expected to have low or zero environmental impact.

The reflection of this can also be seen in the different methods developed since early 1990s for assessing the environmental performance of buildings. While there is a lack of agreement on the full list of necessary environmental indicators (Passer et al. 2012), the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method seems to have been accepted as useful for evaluating the environmental impacts of a building. The LCA methodology complies with the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) 14040 standards provided in 1997 to address different aspects of sustainable building design and construction (International Organization for Standardization 2006).

An LCA analysis considers all stages of a building’s life from production to use, and disposal. Each of these phases requires raw materials and energy as inputs, meaning that every stage of a building’s life potentially emits carbon, and also creates waterborne and solid waste products. Among the environmental indicators, carbon emissions have been recognised as the most important because of their contribution to global warming. The evidence shows that the pace of global warming will shortly exceed that of the worst-case scenarios predicted for 2003 and 2005 (Roaf et al. 2009). The effect of human-induced global warming has contributed to recent heavy precipitation events (Min et al. 2011). Given that greenhouse gas emissions are one of the factors that affect climate change (Carter et al. 2015), and as noted above, given that buildings are huge consumers of energy (Stojiljkovie et al. 2015), the design of energy-efficient buildings should make a substantial difference in climate change mitigation.

Life Cycle Energy Analysis (LCEA) exclusively evaluates the total amount of energy inputs to a building during its life span. LCEA is thus a derivative of LCA but only deals with energy, and by implication, carbon, if that energy comes from fossil fuels. Calculation of the embodied energy (EE) and operational energy (0E) indicates the total energy a building consumes within its lifetime (Fay et al. 2000).

Embodied energy is the energy consumed for the mining and production of raw materials and transportation of materials to the site. In a building, the embodied energy comes from the materials used both in its initial construction and in its maintenance. The energy required for maintaining comfort conditions is known as the operational energy, which is used for running HVAC systems, providing hot water, lighting and running other appliances. In addition to EE and 0E, some researchers have added the third category of demolition energy (DE), which relates to the energy used for the demolition and recycling phase of a building’s lifespan (Cabeza et al. 2014). However, DE is often ignored because it is very small compared to EE and OE (Fay et al. 2000). Both the construction and use of buildings lead to significant negative environmental impacts which also normally contribute to climate change.

1.3 Biomimicry

Biomimicry has been proposed as a means of merging environmental consideration into design projects in order to achieve sustainability (Wahl 2006). Biomimicry has also been associated with innovation, which might or might not lead to building sustainability (Section 3.1.2 in Chapter 3). The question is whether biomimicry has much to offer energy-efficient design and this is explored in this book. Technological innovations have been shown to increase the energy efficiency of energy-consuming systems (Herring and Roy 2007), and in the same context, biomimicry has been recognised as an innovative design approach for improving energy-efficient design (Lurie-Luke 2014, Radwan and Osama 2016, Pedersen Zari 2018). As Angela Nahikian stated: “Nature is constantly innovating, endlessly experimenting and ever reinventing itself in the face of new challenges. From materials and products to business models, biomimicry offers a fresh lens for all the dreamers and doers remaking the man-made world” (The Biomimicry Institute 2019). It has also been suggested that biomimetic design might provide opportunities for creating a shift in the way design normally proceeds (Vincent et al. 2005).

One of the benefits of adopting biomimicry principles in the construction industry is the potential reduction in global warming. It seems that nature uses low-energy processes (Oguntona and Aigbavboa 2018) and this suggests the presence of numerous examples of biological organisms which could be explored for the energy-efficient processes they use to inform innovative solutions for solving human design problems. The purpose of this book is to seek out these examples and find a way of presenting them that makes it easy for designers to look for energy-efficient solutions in nature that can be applied to buildings.

References

• Abergel, T., Dean, B. and John Dulac, J. (2017). Global Status Report 2017, United Nations Environment/IEA. Retrieved from https://www.worldgbc.org/sites/default/files/UNEP%20188_GABC_en%20%28web%29.pdf.
• Akadiri, P. O., Chinyio, E. A. and Olomolai...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1. Building Energy Use and Climate Change
• 2. Thermal Issues and Building Design
• 3. Biomimicry and Its Approaches to Energy-Efficient Building Design
• 4. Linking Biology and Buildings
• 5. Developing a Structure for the ThBA
• 6. Thermoregulation in Nature
• 7. Parallels in Building Design
• 8. Testing the ThBA
• 9. Developing a Framework for Bio-Inspired Energy-Efficient Building Design
• Index