Rcgm Roel Loonen

Bio-inspired Adaptive Building Skins

How do living organisms capture, convert, store and process energy, water and sunlight? How does nature cool down, heat up, provide shade, and control light? Adaptability, the ability of a system to act in response to variations in environmental conditions often plays a key role in this context. Unlike living organisms, buildings are typically conceived as static, inanimate objects. Because a building’s surroundings and internal conditions are constantly changing, there is a lot to learn about how inspiration from nature can foster more adaptability of the facade for enhanced building performance. After highlighting the need for more adaptability in the built environment, this chapter reviews state-of-the-art examples of research concepts and design applications with bio-inspired adaptable solutions for the building envelope. All examples are in the scope of building physics and energy efficiency with a focus on improving indoor environmental quality. The chapter concludes with an outlook of design support methodologies that can potentially incite the practical uptake of bio-inspired adaptive building skins in the future.

Science foresight using life-cycle analysis, text mining and clustering: A case study on natural ventilation

Abstract Science foresight comprises a range of methods to analyze past, present and expected research trends, and uses this information to predict the future status of different fields of science and technology. With the ability to identify high-potential development directions, science foresight can be a useful tool to support the management and planning of future research activities. Science foresight analysts can choose from a rather large variety of approaches. There is, however, relatively little information about how the various approaches can be applied in an effective way. This paper describes a three-step methodological framework for science foresight on the basis of published research papers, consisting of (i) life-cycle analysis, (ii) text mining and (iii) knowledge gap identification by means of automated clustering. The three steps are connected using the research methodology of the research papers, as identified by text mining. The potential of combining these three steps in one framework is illustrated by analyzing scientific literature on wind catchers; a natural ventilation concept which has received considerable attention from academia, but with quite low application in practice. The knowledge gaps that are identified show that the automated foresight analysis is indeed able to find uncharted research areas. Results from a sensitivity analysis further show the importance of using full-texts for text mining instead of only title, keywords and abstract. The paper concludes with a reflection on the methodological framework, and gives directions for its intended use in future studies.

Towards simulation-assisted performance monitoring of BIPV systems considering shading effects

Nowadays, the application of BIPV systems is growing very fast and among this type of technology, application of BIPV facade systems is becoming more common. A main question in this field is how we can ensure the intended performance of such systems considering different involved parameters over the systems life-time. To do so, we need to be able to predict normal behavior of BIPV systems in urban environments, considering the effect of shading from neighboring obstructions. This research investigates a combination of real-time shading simulation using Rhino and Grasshopper with BIPV performance monitoring to detect abnormal system operation. The application of this approach is demonstrated for a 12 m2 vertical BIPV system in the SolarBEAT test facility in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. We have conducted an experiment to better understand the impact of different partial shading scenarios on the I-V curve of a vertical CIGS BIPV panel. The results show that the simulation-assisted approach, coupled with data visualization and a decision tree can be a powerful tool for guaranteeing robust BIPV system output.