Leonidas Bourikas

Lancaster University | LU · Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA)

Sustainable buildings are designed to reduce energy use and other environmental impacts and to provide indoor environmental conditions that maximize well-being and satisfaction among building occupants. However, occupants' comfort in and satisfaction with such buildings has been inconsistent. Evidence indicates occupants' expectations of indoor bui...

Buildings are expected to provide healthy and comfortable indoor environmental conditions for their users. Such conditions have diverse dimensions, including thermal, visual, air quality, auditory, and olfactory aspects. Indoor environmental quality standards, guidelines, and codes typically inform professionals in the building design and operation...

The energy sector and electricity generation in particular, is responsible for a great share of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. World electricity generation is still largely based on the burning of fossil fuels. However, Brazil has already a very low electricity carbon intensity due to the country’s large hydropower capacity. In countrie...

Current research on human comfort has identified a gap in the investigation of multi-domain perception interactions. There is a lack of understanding the interrelationships of different physio-socio-psychological factors and the manifestation of their contextual interactions into cross-modal comfort perception. In that direction, this study used da...

Research indicates that school children have lower comfort levels than adults and this exacerbates the challenge of tackling the risks of summer overheating in schools without resorting to air conditioning. UN SDG 13 calls for climate action to strengthen the resilience of our cities and reduce the impact of climate change. In this work, a modern,...

Digital technology has been presented as part of the solution to revolutionise public services, such as social care with its rising costs and demand. Here we present the outcome of an ongoing trial of CareTeam, a digital platform used during the redesign of the commission of domiciliary care for Portsmouth City Council, UK. CareTeam comprises a mob...

Digital technology has been presented as part of the solution to revolutionise public services, such as social care with its rising costs and demand. Here we present the outcome of an ongoing trial of CareTeam, a digital platform used during the redesign of the commission of domiciliary care for Portsmouth City Council, UK. CareTeam comprises a mob...

A discussion of sustainability in architecture cannot be meaningfully carried out without the inclusion of most buildings’ central purpose, namely the provision of indoor environments that are accommodating of occupants’ needs and requirements. To this end, building designers and operators are expected to demonstrate compliance with codes and stand...

In buildings, occupants' interactions with systems and their behaviour is often influenced by environmental discomfort; thermal, visual, acoustic or air quality. Many studies have investigated the relationships between occupant behaviour and one of these discomforts, but very few studies have addressed multi-stressor effects. This paper reviews the...

Thermal comfort research has been traditionally based on cross-sectional studies and spatial aggregation of individual surveys at building level. This research design is susceptible to compositional effects and may lead to error in identifying predictors to thermal comfort indices, in particular in relation to adaptive mechanisms. A relationship be...

Building occupants are continuously exposed to multiple indoor environmental stimuli, including thermal, visual, acoustic, and air quality related factors. Moreover, personal and contextual aspects can be regarded as additional domains influencing occupants’ perception and behaviour. The scientific literature in this area typically deals with these...

p>Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is a process that can reveal the interrelations between key building performance factors and successfully integrate indoor environmental quality, thermal comfort, functionality, environmental strategy and occupants' satisfaction. POE has become a prerequisite for several building certification systems and it is oft...

There is a need for new thinking in care previsions and IOT is likely to play a major role in achieving transformation of care services at lower cost. Such an approach sits at the heart of this work. Here we present the outcome of an ongoing research programme based on sensor and App interventions (trial) at homes of participants who live independe...

Research on the determinants of direct and indirect energy use has identified a range of relevant socioeconomic factors. However, we still know little about possible influences of people's health on their energy use. Do people in poor health use less energy because they are on lower incomes, or do they have additional domestic energy needs as they...

The current standard adaptive control algorithm was developed twenty years ago from field studies in 26 buildings across Europe. In the UK, the correlation between comfort temperature and measures of outside temperature was around 0.2. In this paper, we review the results of 1,081 surveys from 84 participants carried out in two buildings in the UK...

The current standard adaptive control algorithm was developed twenty years ago from field studies in 26 buildings across Europe. In the UK, the correlation between comfort temperature and measures of outside temperature was around 0.2. In this paper, we review the results of 1,081 surveys from 84 participants carried out in two buildings in the UK...

The UK needs to accelerate action to achieve its 80 per cent carbon reduction target by 2050 as it is otherwise in danger of lagging behind. A much discussed question in this context is whether voluntary behaviour change initiatives can make a significant contribution to reaching this target. While providing individuals with general information on...

Available online xxxx JEL classification: Q2 Q4 Q29 Q41 This paper investigates the effects of behavioural interventions on energy conservation in naturally ventilated offices. Our aim is to inform building managers, environmental consultants, and social scientists on the effectiveness of low-cost, easy-to-implement interventions aimed at reducing...

A user-centered dynamic approach for the provision of domiciliary care services based on the sharing economy paradigm is introduced in this paper. The work stems from a collaborative research project entitled "Adult Support Digital Platform (ASDP)" linking academia, industry and a local authority (Southampton City). The approach undertaken is to li...

The Little Book of Rezoning explores the issue of city regeneration, specifically in relation to a UK post Industrial Revolution context. The book looks at the question of how rezoning of an area can be used to deliver on wider city aspirations. Avoiding isolation and segregation of city residents is shown to be a key issue to address and one which...

This ‘Little Book’ is a whistle-stop tour of ‘Energy and the City’. The book identifies ways to help cities achieve energy and carbon emissions savings through interventions in the urban environment that are not too drastic or expensive. The uses of energy in the city are complex and multifaceted, so we won’t be able to cover everything here. In th...

This paper investigates the thermal performance offour school buildings of different ages and characteristics, using current EU overheating criteria and ‘adjusted’ criteria based on children's lower comfort temperature found in recent research. Data collected in Southampton, UK, between 2011-2015 are used in the analysis, which consists of two part...

This data article presents the UK City LIFE1 data set for the city of Birmingham, UK. UK City LIFE1 is a new, comprehensive and holistic method for measuring the livable sustainability performance of UK cities. The Birmingham data set comprises 346 indicators structured simultaneously (1) within a four-tier, outcome-based framework in order to aid...

This research aims to quantify occupants’ window behaviour impact to the energy performance gap. Occupants’ window behaviour poses a real challenge to energy demand control in mixed-mode buildings. A window being left open, may compromise the efficiency of the ventilation system. Applying a mixed-method approach, this study was carried out over the...

In parallel to major demographic change occurring in societies today, austerity measures in the UK have had a considerable impact on local authority budget including social care for the elderly. This work reports on novel research, which aims to harness the value and the power of sharing economy based on digital platforms augmented by surveys to su...

Recently, much of the literature on sharing in cities has focused on the sharing economy, in which people use online platforms to share underutilized assets in the marketplace. This view of sharing is too narrow for cities, as it neglects the myriad of ways, reasons, and scales in which citizens share in urban environments. Research presented here...

Urban and building energy simulation models are usually driven by typical meteorological year (TMY) weather data often in a TMY2 or EPW format. However, the locations where these historical datasets were collected (usually airports) generally do not represent the local, site specific micro-climates that cities develop. In this paper, a humid sub-tr...

Naturally ventilated offices enable users to control their environment through the opening of windows. Whilst this level of control is welcomed by users, it creates risk in terms of energy performance, especially during the heating season. In older office buildings, facilities managers usually obtain energy information at the building level. They a...

Studies have shown that people feel more comfortable when they can control the environment in which they live and work. In a mixed-mode office building, this control is usually through openable windows, but window opening behaviour can have a significant impact on building energy performance. This monitoring study investigated window behaviours in...

Urban and building energy simulation models are usually driven by typical meteorological year (TMY) weather data often in a TMY2 or EnergyPlus Weather data file (EPW) format. In addition, currently, in many countries, weather data files with a TMY format are used for building regulation compliance calculations. However, the locations where these hi...

Reducing energy demand in dwellings is an important component of meeting carbon reduction targets. The drivers of this demand are linked to occupant practices, varying greatly between people and locations. Heating, as the main component of energy demand in dwellings in the UK, is often associated with thermal comfort, defined in ASHRAE 55 as the 'c...

This work explores the hypothesis that exposure to high indoor temperatures during winter can change thermal expectations of the occupants, challenging the standard boundaries of thermal comfort and leading to excess in energy demand for heating. The analysis presented here is based on two case study social housing tower buildings where indoor temp...

Adaptive comfort theory states that over time people adapt to their normal environment. Therefore, people from different climates are expected to have different thermal preferences and behaviours, which could lead to ‘performance gap’ in buildings with occupants of diverse climate backgrounds. This study investigates the influence of occupants’ the...

Urban and building energy simulations are usually initiated with typical meteorological year weather data. However, the locations where these historical datasets were collected (usually airports) do not represent the local, site specific micro-climates that cities develop. An idealised “urban unit model” (250m radius) has been developed for use wit...

This paper presents some installation and data analysis issues from an ongoing urban air temperature and humidity measurement campaign in Hangzhou and Ningbo, China. The location of the measurement sites, the positioning of the sensors and the harsh conditions in an urban environment can result in missing values and observations that are unre-prese...

Building performance and solar energy system simulations are typically undertaken with standardised weather files which do not generally consider future climate predictions. This paper investigates the generation of climate change adapted simulation weather data for locations worldwide from readily available data sets. An approach is presented for...