Alejandro Mesa

Assessing the Solar Resource in Forested Urban Environments: Results from the use of a Photographic-Computational Method

The paper presents a method for the assessment of the permeability of tree crowns to solar radiation. It is based on the use of software for computational treatment of photographic images and was developed with the goal of counting on a tool that would allow to quantify the available solar radiation in vegetated urban environments. The method evaluates the effect of the direct, diffuse and reflected radiation filtered through the canopy, in a single value. The results obtained with the proposed method are compared with those yielded by field measurements and by the manual counting of dots on a dot mesh overlaid on blown-up photographic images. Finally, the results arrived at by the application of the method, in low and high density urban environments and for the different seasons of the year, are presented. The values obtained indicate that the availability of the solar resource in winter as conditioned by tree crowns, varies between 46.23% and 24.09% and the blocking of the same in summer fluctuates between 80.27% and 85.47% depending in either case, on the tree species, its phenological features and its development stage.

Energy Efficient School Buildings in Central-Western Argentina an Assessment of Alternative Typologies for the Classroom Tier

Publisher Summary Four energy-efficient demonstration school buildings are built in the western province of Mendoza, Argentina, as a part of a massive building program required to implement the new Federal Education Plan. The buildings make the maximum use of bioclimatic strategies and daylighting. It is noted that the aspects of typology of the classroom tiers became immediately apparent as one of the main conditioners of the overall scheme. Three different alternative schemes are essentially designed and built. Four typologies of the classroom tier using the same, locally available technology, are being assessed in the aspects of energy efficiently, thermal and luminous comfort, construction and operation costs, and environmental impact. The chapter presents the provisional results of the first two items—namely, the energy efficiency and the thermal comfort.