About
58
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Introduction
Marilena De Simone currently works at the Department of Environmental Engineering, University of Calabria. Marilena does research in Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. She is a member of the international network SECRET (Social Science, Engineering, Computing Research in Energy Topics). She is also the local coordinator of the INPATH-TES network and of the IEA EBC ANNEX 79 Occupant-Centric Building Design and Operation.
Publications
Publications (58)
This paper introduces a database of 34 field-measured building occupant behavior datasets collected from 15 countries and 39 institutions across 10 climatic zones covering various building types in both commercial and residential sectors. This is a comprehensive global database about building occupant behavior. The database includes occupancy patte...
The availability of computational power, and a wealth of data from sensors have boosted the development of model-based predictive control for smart and effective control of advanced buildings in the last decade. More recently occupant-behavior models have been developed for including people in the building control loops. However, while important ob...
![Figure 1. Life cycle assessment framework. Adapted from [48].](publication/356990010/figure/fig1/AS:1100543325941762@1639401384463/Life-cycle-assessment-framework-Adapted-from-48_Q320.jpg)
![Daily heating schedules (On = 1, Off = 0). Adapted from [33].](publication/356990010/figure/tbl1/AS:1100543325929474@1639401384486/Daily-heating-schedules-On-1-Off-0-Adapted-from-33_Q320.jpg)
![Energy consumption [kWh/year] for heating and cooling with setpoint...](publication/356990010/figure/tbl4/AS:1100543330131972@1639401385257/Energy-consumption-kWh-year-for-heating-and-cooling-with-setpoint-temperatures-of-20_Q320.jpg)
Climate change has a strong influence on the energy consumption of buildings, affecting both the heating and cooling demand in the actual and future scenario. In this paper, a life cycle assessment (LCA) was performed to evaluate the influence of both the occupant behaviour and the climate change on the environmental impact of the heating and cooli...
In European efficient buildings, the share of energy use for DHW is a significant percentage of the heat requirement. The evaluation of DHW energy demand and consumption patterns has been neglected in the past and studies are located in Northern countries. This paper presents a survey conducted in Southern Italy. Descriptive statistics were perform...
Occupants’ adaptive strategies play an important role in office buildings' energy consumption. Previous research has mostly focused on the adaptive strategies triggered by occupants’ indoor discomfort; however, it is crucial to understand if specific adaptive strategies are linked to occupants’ energy-saving intentions. This study explores the rela...
Occupancy modeling in office buildings is still in progress and needs to be developed by using observable data. In this paper, an office building under the Mediterranean climate was instrumental in the collection of both indoor environmental parameters (air temperature and relative humidity, CO2, VOC) and user action-related variables (electricity...
Worldwide, there are many options to ensure domestic hot water (DHW) provision in dwellings. This study aimed to depict the distribution of energy sources and DHW production systems in the Calabria region. The research was focused on understanding which variables, among contextual variables and building characteristics, may influence the adoption o...
Energy performance of buildings is a worldwide increasing investigated field, due to ever more stringent energy standards aimed at reducing the buildings’ impact on the environment. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact that occupant behavior and climate change have on the heating and cooling needs of residential buildings. With this ai...
Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) plays a key role in determining occupants’
productivity at work; however, the analyses in the interconnected factors among
building physical, attitudinal, social and demographic components in one study are
lacking. To link this research gap, this study investigates these interconnected factors’
influence on occupa...
Dado que el éxito de desarrollar edificios con mayor eficiencia energética tiene una dependencia quirúrgica del comportamiento de los ocupantes y el uso de los sistemas, la necesidad de tener en cuenta su comportamiento correcto en la simulación del diseño de los edificios en etapa inicial y la evaluación del consumo de energía, aumenta rápidamente...
In recent years, research has emerged to quantitatively and qualitatively understand occupants' interactions with buildings. However, there has been surprisingly little research on building interfaces and how their design, context (e.g., location), and underlying logic impact their usability and occupants’ perceived control, as well as the resultin...
In light of recent research, it is evident that occupants are playing an increasingly important role in building energy performance. Despite the important role of building energy codes and standards in design, the occupant-related aspects are typically simple and have not kept up with the leading research. This paper reviews 23 regions’ building en...
Resumen: Una importante parte del consumo de energía de los edificios está relacionado con el comportamiento de los ocupantes. Lo que significa que es necesario conocer con mayor precisión cómo se comporta y se mueve el usuario dentro de los ambientes, y este es uno de los retos que requiere conocer los tipos de tecnologías para la detección de la...
In the last four decades several methods have been used to model occupants’ presence and actions (OPA) in buildings according to different purposes, available computational power, and technical solutions. This study reviews approaches, methods and key findings related to OPA modeling in buildings. An extensive database of related research documents...
This study investigates human-building interaction in office spaces across multiple countries including Brazil, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, the United States, and Taiwan. We analyze social-psychological, contextual, and demographic factors to explain crosscountry differences in adaptive thermal actions (i.e. cooling and heating behaviors) and confo...
Improving occupant's satisfaction represents an important target oriented both towards the increment of productivity and towards the reduction of operational costs related to health and safety of employees. These considerations are the bases of an interdisciplinary cross-country survey on the human-building interaction in office buildings. The prop...
This paper experimentally studies and compares the addition of fins and the addition of metal wool in a latent heat thermal energy storage (TES) system as heat transfer enhancement techniques. Despite the well-known suitability of fins as enhancement technique, their implementation cost in the TES system is one of its main drawbacks. Therefore, the...
The paper presents a review of the literature on the use of the questionnaire as a tool for collecting energy data in residential buildings. Numerous studies used the questionnaire to gather necessary information for different purposes. However, even using the same tool, the procedures differ in terms of distribution and compilation, contact with t...
An experimental set-up was built in an office with the aim of obtaining information regarding occupancy patterns by monitoring occupancy state, air temperature, relative humidity, CO2, VOC, door and window opening, and electricity usage. Heuristic approaches were applied: cluster analysis and models based on logical flowcharts. Cluster analysis was...
![Figure 1. Energy consumption by sector [3]](profile/Gianmarco-Fajilla/publication/331698084/figure/fig1/AS:735461869879296@1552359182683/Energy-consumption-by-sector-3_Q320.jpg)
The role that occupants have on energy consumption and performance of buildings is known, but still requires a great deal of research. In this paper, the most common techniques to detect occupancy and occupant behavior in buildings are categorized with their advantages and disadvantages. Being the buildings characterized by different energy usage,...
Widespread overbuilding, the prevalence of asphalt surfaces on green areas, and the use of building materials with low heat dissipation abilities are among the main causes of Urban Heat Islands. Within urban areas, evapotranspiration and shade from plants can significantly reduce the UHI phenomenon, help in stormwater management, and reduce buildin...
The aim of the study was to create and administer a questionnaire to collect data and obtain typical occupancy profiles of residential buildings. The survey was developed by considering previous experiences conducted in the University of Calabria since 2012, and it was distributed among 80 families via email, face-to-face and through social network...
This report presents the main findings of the activity 4.4 “Reference procedures for obtaining occupancy profiles in residential building” belonging to IEA EBC Annex 66 Subtask A. The activity was conducted with the aim of providing methods to describe occupancy in residential buildings and technical approaches to define occupancy profiles for ener...
Sensors were applied in an office building to obtain information regarding user presence and absence intervals. Occupancy was also recorded by manual observation, and indoor parameters such as air temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide (CO2), volatile organic compounds (VOC) were monitored. Occupants’ behaviors regarding door/window (open/c...
This study presents results from an interdisciplinary survey assessing contextual and behavioral factors driving occupants’ interaction with building and systems in offices located across three different Mediterranean climates in Turin (Northern), Perugia (Central), and Rende (Southern) Italy. The survey instrument is grounded in an interdisciplina...
Residential energy consumptions are determined by the interaction of many factors. Apart from physical characteristics such as climate, heating type, age, and size of the house, occupants’ behavior and socio-economic aspects are critical. Furthermore, the relative impact of the occupants’ characteristics and behavior seems to differ in various inve...
Occupant sensing and data acquisition are essential elements for occupant behavior research. A wide range of different types of sensors has been implemented to collect rich information on occupants and their interactions with the built environment, such as presence, actions, power consumption, etc. This information establishes a foundation to study...
Disposal process of lead batteries allows recovering not only lead but also sodium sulphate that could be used for the production of a very interesting material.
Thermal performance and stability over time are key parameters for the characterization and application of PCMs in the building sector. Generally, inorganic PCMs are dispersions of hydrated salts and additives in water that counteract phase segregation phenomena and subcooling. Traditional methods or in "house" methods can be used for evaluating th...
The objective of obtaining high performance energy buildings can be reached considering the contemporaneous effects of technical characteristics and occupancy. Recent studies report that as buildings become more energy efficient, the behavior of occupants plays an increasing role in consumption. Therefore, a construction designed to be a Nearly Zer...
Glauber’s salt (sodium sulphate decahydrate) is a promising phase change material (PCM) for use in the building sector, thanks to its high enthalpy of fusion associated with a proper phase transition temperature. It also offers economic and environmental advantages because it can be obtained as a byproduct from the disposal process of lead batterie...
European and Italian standards establish high levels of energy performance of buildings that have to be designed considering their energy balance near zero. To achieve this goal, the reduction of energy demand, attainable by improving energy efficiency of the construction, and the use of renewable energy available both on site and off site are effe...
The residential sector is used to test the relative roles of socioeconomic and behavioral variables of occupants as compared with the climate and physical building characteristics. The study is carried out considering a housing stock in Mediterranean area.
In order to dynamically characterise the opaque components of a building envelope subject to sinusoidal loadings in steady periodic regime conditions, the use of nondimensional periodic thermal transmittance is proposed. Such a parameter allows for the evaluation of the decrement factor and time lag that the heat flux undergoes while crossing the w...
An analytical solution of the phase change problem, known as the Stefan or Moving Boundary Problem, in a PCM layer (phase change materials) subject to boundary conditions that are variable in time, is presented, in steady periodic regime. The two-phase Stefan Problem is resolved considering periodic boundary conditions of temperature or of heat flu...
In the last few years an increasing attention has been paid to efficient energy construction systems in the building sector. Although in this contest extensive green roofs are reported to be very effective and sustainable systems, the fact that the main agents of this systems are living organisms have generated doubts, especially in locations where...
Among the different adoptable solutions of building envelope, of particular interest is the green roof which allows to obtain, at the same time, energy, economic and environmental benefits using solar energy as source for its operation. The aim of the proposed study is to evaluate the energy and economic savings achievable through the installation...
The authors propose a methodology to schematize correctly the capacitive effects in the transmission of heat in the multilayered walls of buildings.
An analytical study is presented related to a steady periodic regime allowing consideration of three external loads acting singularly or simultaneously: air temperature, apparent sky temperature and in...
Nel corso degli ultimi 10 anni sono stati elaborati diversi modelli matematici descriventi le modalità di trasporto di energia termica e di massa tra gli strati componenti la copertura a verde e tra questi e l’ambiente circostante, sia esterno che interno. Nella stratigrafia possono essere individuate le diverse modalità di trasmissione del calore...
In questo capitolo vengono presentate delle valutazioni relative ai risparmi energetici ed economici conseguibili a seguito dell’installazione di una stratigrafia a verde su diverse tipologie di tetti tradizionali. Tale intervento risulta essere di interesse per gli edifici di nuova costruzione ma anche nelle ristrutturazioni destinate al miglioram...
The main limit of photovoltaic (PV) systems is the low conversion efficiency of cells, which is strongly influenced by their operating temperature. As the temperature increases the short circuit current (Isc) increases moderately, while the open circuit voltage (Voc) decreases considerably. The cell temperature reduction is a useful methodology tha...
European Directive 2010/31/CE on energy efficiency in the buildings sector provides for significant actions for the reductions in energy consumption, and Directive RES 2009/28/CE stimulates the use of energy from renewable sources in order to meet such objectives. The chapter presents indications about the use of solar radiation for the energy requ...
E' presentata una metodologia per l'analisi dinamica delle pareti degli edifici nelle reali condizioni di impiego, soggette all'azione simultanea delle tre forzanti: temperatura dell'aria, temperatura apparente del cielo e irraggiamento solare. Mediante l'analogia elettrica e la risoluzione del circuito equivalente è stata ricavata l'espressione de...
The results of an experimental investigation on the exchange of radiant energy in the infrared band (λ = 4–100 μm) between the walls of a building and the surrounding environment, constituted in part by the sky and in part by the ground, are presented in this paper. The measures were obtained on a purpose built test module for studies and research...
Solar heat gains obtainable from attached sunspaces to air-conditioned rooms are evaluated by means of the solution to the optical problem of incident solar radiation absorption through the windows and of the temperature field in the shell separating the sunspace from outdoors and adjacent spaces. The effective absorption coefficient of the sunspac...
A model for the calculation of solar heat gain through glazed surfaces, to be used in the simplified calculation of thermal energy requirements in air-conditioned buildings, is proposed. The model uses the effective absorption coefficient of the indoor environment to take into account that the entering energy is in part absorbed by the surfaces of...
Following the increasing global request for natural gas, the regasification of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is becoming a more widespread process. Liquefied natural gas is transported by gas tankers at a temperature of around 113K at atmospheric pressure. The successive process of regasification, necessary to inlet the gas in the pipeline network, m...
This paper proposes a simplified model for the evaluation of the solar energy absorbed by a sunspace using an effective absorption coefficient defined as the ratio of the solar energy absorbed by the internal surfaces of the room and the solar energy entering through the glazed surfaces. Reference is made to a simple geometries constituting volumes...
A glazed space adjacent to an air-conditioned room is an innovative architectural solution to use the energy contribution of solar radiation in the winter and in the intermediate months, whereas in the summer adequate shading sys- tems are needed. The sunspace is separated from the said room by a wall, generally in part opaque in part glazed, which...
Projects
Project (1)
As building envelopes and mechanical and electrical equipment become more efficient, the impact of occupants on building energy increases. Meanwhile trends in teleworking, co-working, and home-sharing mean vastly different occupancy than the standard occupancy schedules. Finally, global expectations for comfort are increasing, while a variety of new technologies may or may not succeed in meeting this demand. The convergence of these trends has necessitated a new look at how occupants are incorporated into building design and operation practice throughout the building life-cycle.
The field of occupant modelling emerged over four decades ago; however, it has surged in the past decade – particularly as a result of IEA EBC Annex 66 – “Simulation and Definition of Occupant Behaviour in Buildings”. Annex 66 played an important role in formalizing experimental research methods, modeling and model validation, and occupant simulation. Given the number of unanswered questions about occupant comfort and behaviour and minimal penetration of advanced occupant modelling into practice, this follow-up Annex 79 - “Occupant-centric building design and operation”. The IEA EBC Annex 79 term is from 2018-2023. More details here: http://annex79.iea-ebc.org/
