EMDV8008 Research Proposal | Green Commercial Buildings

Introduction

Depletion of natural resources is increasing day by day around the world. With the depletion of natural resources, need for making environmentally friendly building and green buildings are becoming more apparent (Anand and Amor 2017). The buildings that are built with keeping environment in mind is known as the green buildings. The green buildings are newly constructed as well as renovated with sustainable development. The sustainable development is basically a design process which reduces all harmful impacts on the natural resources as well as looks at cost of life-cycle of facility. The benefits related to green building are very easily understandable. By following the green design technique, the developers and the building owners does well financially by maintaining a good environment as well as social processes. The green buildings that are energy efficient mainly have low operating cost compared to the buildings that are designed conventionally (Shen et al. 2017). Sustainable design also helps to minimize all broad environmental impacts that includes depletion of ozone layer, usage of raw materials, and usage of water. The workers working in a safe, and comfortable environment are happier and are more productive, which is considered to be the key factor in labor market.

This research paper consists of a study about the green building and the aspects that are needed to design a green building. This proposal illustrates some objectives for carrying out this research paper. The basic concepts of designing green building are discussed in this paper along with heating role, ventilating as well as air-conditioning that ensures high performance of green buildings in operating and designing operation (Moss and Marvin 2016). There are also design strategies for effective as well as green HVAC systems that are explained in this paper with new emerging technologies for green buildings.

Research Rationale

The criteria of green building mostly depends on energy efficiency, resource conservation, sustainable design as well as material that re used for designing the building. The materials as well as designs that were used traditionally had many issues that were related to human health and also caused environmental hazards. So, to mitigate those issues of health, the concept of green building is used in which the buildings are environmental friendly. This research is important because it deals with all such design aspects of green building that are used to make eco-friendly buildings.

Research Objectives

The objective of this research paper are stated below:

• To understand the strategies and the methods for mitigating the environmental impacts on construction of buildings
• To understand the design strategies for building an effective and a green building system
• To study the ways about how the HVAC building designs integrated with holistic approach helps to build a sustainable environment

Literature Review

Kembel et al. (2014) stated that for achieving a sustainable future in building sector, there are many adoption that can be taken for covering many features. The multi-disciplinary features that are used for making a green building are energy saving, improving the material use, minimize the material waste, emission control as well as pollution. The recent building activity nature can specifically controlled as well as improved so that less environmental damage is done without decreasing the output activities of the building that are needed. For creating competitive advantage by the use of environmental-friendly practices in construction industries, the life-cycle of the whole building should come under these practices.

According to Huang et al. (2015) for designing a better building, a team for green project should rethink the building design and change the construction process so that the building performance can be improved. For improving the energy efficiency as well as improving the environment sound operations, there should be design that will support high sustainable performance that will provide indoor environment which enhances the occupant’s productivity.

There are design strategies that minimizes air pollution, solid waste, and wastewater. As discussed by Hraska (2015) there are mainly six distinct features which can reduce the consumption as well as pollution. The six distinct features are building materials that are resource efficient, designs that will help to minimize the waste as well as usage of materials, contract that minimizes the management of job site, and finally contracts that includes recyclable products with the recycled content.

As stated by Kibert (2016) the concept of green building also states the right thing to do. The technological advance methodologies are mostly attracting the designers of building to adopt such technologies. Some of the new systems that can be used for adopting new technologies includes radiant heating as well as cooling, photovoltaics integrated with building, air systems, high performance glazing, as well as increasing digital controls as well as sensors that are used in most of the recent projects (Zuo and Zhao 2014). There are many new technologies that are used as design strategy of green building.

Conclusion

The approaches towards green building helps the owners of the building as well as the manager, to reduce the energy consumption of building, improving the working environment, reducing the impacts of environment related to building. If operation cost is reduced while building, then there will be increase in the occupant productivity, and decrease the health complaints. The green building is responsible for eco-friendly environment. For ensuring the eco-friendly building system, the HVAC system has an important role as many factors of green building gets directly affected or as indirectly affected by performance of HVAC system. From the above discussion it can be concluded that there is a need of holistic as well as integrated design for project inception for optimizing HVAC design as well as operation required for the green buildings. There are few HVAC technologies that are used presently. The technologies for designing green buildings are used for many applications and also improves the performance to decrease the cost of the building design and helps to integrate many new systems in the conventional methods of HVAC systems. Making of green building means being in happy tenants as well as be in healthy occupancy rate. So, to achieve green buildings, the building owners will incorporate all the technologies so that they can get a powerful advantage in market. The HVAC as well as the building designers will be responsible for making this real as well as contributing the design towards green revolution.

References

Anand, C.K. and Amor, B., 2017. Recent developments, future challenges and new research directions in LCA of buildings: A critical review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 67, pp.408-416.

Hraska, J., 2015. Chronobiological aspects of green buildings daylighting. Renewable Energy, 73, pp.109-114.

Huang, K.T., Huang, W.P., Lin, T.P. and Hwang, R.L., 2015. Implementation of green building specification credits for better thermal conditions in naturally ventilated school buildings. Building and Environment, 86, pp.141-150.

Kembel, S.W., Meadow, J.F., O’Connor, T.K., Mhuireach, G., Northcutt, D., Kline, J., Moriyama, M., Brown, G.Z., Bohannan, B.J. and Green, J.L., 2014. Architectural design drives the biogeography of indoor bacterial communities. PloS one, 9(1), p.e87093.

Kibert, C.J., 2016. Sustainable construction: green building design and delivery. John Wiley & Sons.

Moss, T. and Marvin, S., 2016. Urban infrastructure in transition: networks, buildings and plans. Routledge.

Shen, L., Yan, H., Fan, H., Wu, Y. and Zhang, Y., 2017. An integrated system of text mining technique and case-based reasoning (TM-CBR) for supporting green building design. Building and Environment, 124, pp.388-401.

Zuo, J. and Zhao, Z.Y., 2014. Green building research–current status and future agenda: A review. Renewable and sustainable energy reviews, 30, pp.271-281.