Taro Mori

Sustainable Design for the Residences in Gaza City

Abstract It has been understood that the environmental impact of housing design, construction and operation has lower priority in research studies as compared to the conventional interests in cost, size, form, location and aesthetics. Gaza′s climatic data indicates that both cold and warm percentages are in the extreme values such as finding a flexible design tool that can satisfy human comfort is an important requirement in a predominantly sustainable architecture concept. Using this new concept to improve the thermal environment and ventilation of buildings through identifying, developing, and testing innovative concepts that can have potential for achieving human satisfaction in homes. Herein, basic principles of Successive Integration Method have been utilized on some materials and varying passive elements to achieve an adequate module′s elements. An integrated design with floor cooling and heating, natural ventilation and some additional passive techniques found that indoor temperature could be properly maintained.

Improving the efficiency of cooling systems in data centers considering equipment characteristics

Internet data centers are helping to expand the network society throughout the world. These data centers require air conditioning to operate, and raising the efficiency of their cooling systems can have significant benefits such as the prevention of equipment failure and the saving of energy as well as improved cost performance. A data center in which much heat-generating equipment has been installed produces a large amount of heat, and achieving a balance between cooling power and fan driving power holds the key to greater efficiency. This study consisted of: 1) full-scale mockup experiments that consider the ventilation of even heat-generating equipment installed in racks; and 2) efficiency evaluation and intake-temperature evaluation based on measurement results for fixed heat-generating equipment using ventilation volume and interequipment gap area as parameters. The results of these evaluations revealed that intake temperature could be predicted when varying these two parameters.

Snow Wall as an Interactive Display in Urban Environment

Public displays have invaded urban spaces, and different types of interactive screens are commonplace. In this poster paper, we describe an unconventional solution to construct an interactive display in an urban environment, projecting on a wall of snow. We demonstrated an interactive installation, where passersby could interact with a playful mirror application using gestures. The demonstrated installation projected on a snow wall offers an inspiring and aesthetic alternative screen set-up, which can also be used as part of the environmental and architectural landscape design for winter contexts.

THERMAL ENVIRONMENT OF CHISE AND TOICHISE IN WINTER SEASON

Recently, people pay attention to a life style of Ainu people who live in Hokkaido and north Asia area as indigenous people. Chise is a traditional house for them. They are made of just local materials such as wood and cogon grasses. In this report, we made two different types of Chise and measure the thermal environments and the skin temperature of the research participants in severe cold weather. The results indicate thermal environment in each Chise is very poor (Toichise is better than Chise). They probably had some method except housing to get warm in cold environment.

ANALYSIS ON HEATING LOAD IN HOUSING IN COLD CLIMATE AREA BY USING GIS DATA: Influence of buildings around a site on direct solar gain@@@ダイレクトソーラーゲイン効果に作用する周辺建物の影響の把握

Direct solar heat gain (hereafter DSHG) is expected to decrease heating energy consumption of housings with airtightness and thick insulation in northern region. It is important to calculate precise solar heat gain through window since the values influence on the strategy whether we should use DSHG or not. In this report we suggest the method to calculate solar radiation in a site where build a building. Then the relationship between thermal environment and heating energy is analyzed by using the climate data combined with GIS data. The results identify that southern sky factor is able to explain an effect of DSHG.

Analysis of cooling characteristics in datacenter using outdoor air cooling

Advancements in information technology have proceeded with developments in information and communication technology (ICT), increasing the demand for building datacenters. The datacenter we studied is located in Ishikari, a cold region in Hokkaido, Japan. The data center cools its electrical devices by outdoor air. We argue that this cooling system is more efficient than other more conventional systems. This paper comprises five sections. In Section 1, we present the background for our work and our objectives. In Section 2, we give an overview of the Ishikari datacenter and discuss the temperature characteristics obtained from annual measurements. We then discuss two problems, short circuit (cool air is exhausted from the server room without passing through the server racks) and recirculation(hot air exhausted from electronic devices goes back through an non-operational part in a rack to the cool area in a server room). In Section 3, we assess the observation results given in Section 2 by using indicators we introduce. The room exhaust-heat efficiency was 0.71 in room A and 0.67 in room B. This means that about 30% of cooling air did not pass through the devices. The equipment reabsorption ratio was 0.30 in room A. In section 4, we discuss our estimation of the annual power consumption for the ventilation flow ratio by using four different patterns. The patterns differed depending on the air conditioning supply-air temperature; 18°C or 27°C, and whether a cap on the operational part in server racks was set. We found that the best method of controlling the cooling system was an air conditioning supply-air temperature of 27° C, set cap, and ventilation flow ratio of 0.51. With this method, the annual power usage effectiveness of this data center was estimated to be 1.11 in room A. In Section 5, we summarize the results of our research.