Engineering Commons^™

Our Energy Future, Fall/Winter 2007, Issue 15

Sustain Magazine

No abstract provided.

Unconventional Energy, Fall/Winter 2015, Issue 31

Sustain Magazine

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of Energy Transitions At Different Scales: Fossil Fuel Divestment In Higher Education And Individual Behavior, Elizabeth Palchak

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

A sociotechnical energy transition requires both a shift to new technologies and attention to social issues like political movements, policy and human behavior. This dissertation investigates social elements of the renewable energy transition occurring at different scales. The core research questions are: How are universities creating and responding to the shifting language of fossil fuel investments? How and for whom do behavioral interventions work? And finally, do in-home displays (IHDs) change behaviors and attitudes of millennial energy users?

The three studies covered here occurred within higher education and reflect the importance of colleges and universities as dynamic players in energy …

Performance Simulation And Evaluation Of Net Zero Energy Buildings In An Australian Coastal Climate, Joel Anderson, Duane A. Robinson, Zhenjun Ma

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

Net zero energy buildings (NZEB) are becoming more common, and as new energy saving designs and technologies become available, the ability to estimate overall energy use and understand the impact on operation of building appliances will become important. This paper outlines simulation results of performance improvements achieved by modifying various components (glazing, lighting, thermal comfort settings) of two tertiary education NZEBs and a typical modern commercial building. The DesignBuilder models' thermal performance and energy consumption were validated using real data from case study buildings. The work shows validating models of smaller, less conven-tional, buildings is more difficult than for larger …

A Method Of Uncertainty Analysis For Whole-Life Embodied Carbon Emissions (Co2-E) Of Building Materials Of A Net-Zero Energy Building In Australia, Mehdi Robati, Daniel J. Daly, Georgios Kokogiannakis

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

The construction of new buildings requires the use of a substantial amount of materials, which have an associated embodied energy for manufacturing, transport, construction and end-of-life disposal. A number of inventories have been developed to collate the typical embodied energy or carbon emissions associated with different building materials and activities, and these can be used to quantify the environmental impacts of different construction methods. However, uncertainty exists in the estimation of embodied CO2-e emissions and other environmental impact results, due to i) inconsistencies in typical embodied carbon emissions values in inventories; ii) errors in estimations of material quantities; iii) assumptions …

Study On Performance Evaluation Of Co2 Heat Pump System Integrated With Thermal Energy Storage For Space Heating, Zhihua Wang, Yuxin Zheng, Fenghao Wang, Mengjie Song, Zhenjun Ma

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

CO2 heat pumps have drawn a great deal of attention owing to their advantages of high efficiency and environmental friendly for heating water under low ambient temperature. However, the system performance is not desirable and shows a lower COP for space heating, especially for a radiator as heating terminal, due to the higher inlet water temperature at the gas cooler, which causes a large throttle loss when the refrigerant flow through the throttling device. To tackle this issue, a transcritical CO2 heat pump system integrated with thermal energy storage (TES) systems was developed in this paper. The heating performance of …

Full-Duplex Ofdm Relaying Systems With Energy Harvesting In Multipath Fading Channels, Jiaman Li, Le Chung Tran, Farzad Safaei

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part B

In this paper, the performance of in-band fullduplex OFDM relaying systems with energy-harvesting and selfinterference cancellation in the polarization domain is analyzed. Specifically, we use the time switching-based relaying protocol to implement energy harvesting. The harvested energy is used by the relay to forward the transmitted information from the source. To cancel the self-interference, the polarization-enabled digital self-interference cancellation scheme is deployed at the relay. Our simulation results show that the full-duplex OFDM energy harvesting relaying system almost doubles the throughput, while maintaining the same bit error performance by a modest increase in the signal-to-noise ratio compared to the half-duplex …