Pieter de Wilde

• PhD
• Professor at University of Strathclyde

The field of building energy management, which monitors and analyses the energy use of buildings with the aim to control and reduce energy expenditure, is seeing a rapid evolution. Automated meter reading approaches, harvesting data at hourly or even half-hourly intervals, create a large pool of data which needs analysis. Computer analysis by means...

The Design Analysis Integration (DAI)-Initiative aims to steer towards new solutions for design analysis integration. These solutions should be able to overcome the limitations of current interoperability approaches that assume the existence of generic and static interfaces in a 'perfect world' in which all information is structured and all mapping...

There is growing concern about the potential impact of climate change on the thermal performance of buildings. Building simulation is well-suited to predict the behaviour of buildings in the future, and to quantify the risks for prime building functions like occupant productivity, occupant health, or energy use. However, on the time scales that are...

The intricate relationship between climate change and the building sector is characterized by a self-reinforcing loop. Rising temperatures driven by global warming will inevitably impact heating and cooling energy, while buildings simultaneously contribute significantly to carbon emissions throughout their lifecycle, further exacerbating climate ch...

Occupancy is one of the primary contributors to the energy performance gap, defined as the difference between actual and predicted energy usage, in buildings. This paper limits its scope to residential buildings, where occupant-centric consumption often goes unaccounted for in standard energy metrics. This paper starts from the hypothesis that a si...

Energy conservation measures (ECMs) are often chosen for their immediate benefits, such as suitability to past/current climate conditions and rapid economic returns. However, the longevity of these ECMs poses a risk of becoming outdated or ineffective as climate change alters the very climatic parameters they were designed for. This paper provides...

Geopolitical, health and economic events have led to an accumulated surge in energy prices in the UK at the beginning of the 2020s. In response, studies and media reports show that households have had to reduce the running of their heating systems to cut their energy bills. However, there is limited research on the impact of this context on indoor...

Purpose Despite the number of quality management procedures being currently applied, construction defects in the domestic sector are acknowledged to contribute to the energy performance gap of buildings. This paper investigates the limitations and challenges to the implementation of project quality plans (PQPs) and their impact on the achievement o...

The preservation of biodiversity is a rising global concern and will have a major impact on the design and management of buildings and their immediate surroundings. Thus far, the majority of work on biodiversity and the built environment appears to focus on urban planning, project development, and the niche area of designing buildings with living w...

The performance of building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) shows high variations due to several factors, including design model uncertainty, installation mode, dirt/soil effects, aging factors, and manufacturing issues. This paper explores the uncertainty of BIPV outputs from the perspectives of both model uncertainty and parameter uncertainty usi...

Purpose Traditional central courtyards have been advocated for being thermally efficient for hot-climate regions. However, exploring previous literature shows that it is not clear to what extent courtyards are truly thermally comfortable. This study determines the level of thermal comfort in residential courtyards in hot-climate regions, taking Bag...

The increasingly hot and long summers due to the climate change will cause a significant increase in energy demand for cooling systems, especially in highly-densely populated regions. The cooling energy needs of buildings are proportional to the Cooling Degree Hours, which consist in the cumulative sum of the positive differences between the hourly...

Defects in building envelopes deteriorate over time without being visible to the human eye, while significantly impacting energy performance due to unaccounted heat transfer. Defects can be characterized in the infrared (IR) spectrum. However, IR readings are typically recorded at singular points in time, when in several cases anomalies can only be...

Uncertainty analysis has become increasingly important to provide reliable energy efficiency assessment of buildings whilst considering inherent uncertain factors. The one-batch sample method is usually used with the Latin Hypercube sampling (LHS) to evaluate building performance, however it is difficult to assess the stability of uncertainty resul...

Thermal building performance simulation is regularly informed by and contrasted with thermal images, mainly focusing on defect identification using perspectives from the infrared (IR) spectrum. However, standard IR readings are typically undergone in singular points in time, when in several cases, such as varying pressure differences or latent heat...

Housing is one of the important necessities for people. It comes after food and drink according to Maslow’s pyramid of human needs. It also influences countries’ social cohesion, stability and development and at the same time is affected by their general conditions. Iraq has a housing sector crisis. The county experiences a large housing shortage....

This short paper provides a number of comments on research on the area of building performance gaps. The core message is that there are many different building performance gaps (plural). This leads to the urgent call for researchers in this area to ensure that they carefully define the scope of their work, and position this in the wider field of bu...

Current approaches towards making buildings more efficient in terms of water consumption are often qualitative and simply based on the inclusion of certain water-saving and recycling design features, or simple water quantity assessments. This paper presents a conceptual framework of an approach that will allow an objective qualification of whether...

Buildings consume energy for different purposes. One core function is to provide healthy and comfortable living conditions for the humans that inhabit these buildings. The associated energy use is significant: taken together, buildings are responsible for roughly 40% of the world’s total annual energy consumption. This large percentage makes the bu...

Construction defects in the domestic sector, especially those occurring in the building fabric, are acknowledged to contribute to the mismatch between the energy use as predicted at design stage and as measured in the building operation. Despite the number of quality management procedures put in place in social housing projects, defects affecting t...

Global sensitivity analysis based on polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) shows interesting characteristics, including reduced simulation runs for computer models and high interpretability of sensitivity results. This paper explores these features of the PCE-based sensitivity analysis using an office building as a case study with the EnergyPlus simulat...

Climate change is considered an important global threat, with a significant impact on the energy performance, since buildings will be subjected to higher average outdoor temperatures. This article explores the relative impact of global warming across the different regional climates of Europe comparing present and estimated future energy needs of a...

Variance-based sensitivity analysis in combination with machine-learning techniques has been increasingly applied in energy analysis of buildings in order to reduce computational cost of running a large number of energy models with sufficient accuracy. This paper compares the performance of two sensitivity analysis methods based on machine-learning...

Model calibration is a necessary step to create reliable energy models in building retrofit. Bayesian computation in model calibration has attracted more attention because it can make full use of prior knowledge on building parameters. However, the likelihood function is hard to be computed in Bayesian computation due to the complexity of building...

Building energy need simulations are usually performed using input files that contain information about the averaged weather data based on historical patterns. Therefore, the simulations performed are not able to provide information about possible future scenarios due to climate change. In this work, future trends of building energy demands due to...

For hot regions, studies have been advocating re-adopting the courtyard pattern for its thermal advantages. Aiming at developing thermally comfortable courtyards, studies have been exploring the impact of courtyards geometry on their shading and natural ventilation, which are the two environmental principles of courtyards. However, there is a lack...

For hot regions, studies have been advocating re-adopting the courtyard pattern for its thermal advantages. Aiming at developing thermally comfortable courtyards, studies have been exploring the impact of courtyards geometry on their shading and natural ventilation, which are the two environmental principles of courtyards. However, there is a lack...

In England, there is a longstanding and increasing undersupply of both affordable and open-market housing. Around three quarters of all new homes in the UK are currently built speculatively by the developer-led private housing sector. However, demand for self-build housing is growing. Concurrently, there is also a need to address the sustainability...

Iraq is facing a housing shortage of around 1.0 million housing units, which is equivalent to around 25% of its current housing stock. At the same time, it suffers from having a low housing production. As a first Step towards managing this challenge, the country needs to identify a proper approach to drive developments. For this purpose, a new Iraq...

In Iraq, the temperature reaches around 0 °C in winter and 50 °C in summer. Aiming at providing thermal comfort for people, studies have been advocating developing innovative thermally responsive designs or adopting traditional architecture's passive design strategies. However, to develop appropriate solutions for the country, it is critical to det...

Building performance analysis is an important yet surprisingly complex activity. This article explores the current understanding of the concept of building performance, and explains why its analysis is a challenging activity that mostly requires expert intervention. It addresses some of the common questions about building performance, such as: What...

This paper compares the central heating settings and the heating energy use performance of six flats and two houses built to low energy standards (Code for Sustainable Homes Levels 4 and 5) with a near identical flat and house built to minimum compliance only (2006 Building Regulations). As low energy houses are only recently emerging in the United...

Construction defects in the domestic sector, especially occurring in the building fabric, are acknowledged to contribute to the energy performance gap of buildings. Discontinuity of insulation layers, gaps in the vapor/air barriers and thermal bridging through building elements lead to undesired heat loss, and thus to the increase of energy use for...

This paper presents essential empirical data on heating setpoint temperatures and durations from UK social housing built to low energy standards. The data was derived from living room air temperature measurements. There were single, double and multiple heating periods per day in the dwellings with mean setpoint temperatures of 20.9°C and 21.0°C on...

Many researchers have experimentally proven the thermal efficiency of courtyard buildings in hot regions during summer. However, a limited number of studies have tackled courtyards’ winter performance. In these studies, it has been stated that courtyards are possibly not efficient for winter conditions. This study aims to address this point. It inv...

Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of building energy has become an active research area in order to consider variations of input variables and identify key variables influencing building energy. When there is only limited information available for uncertainty of building inputs, a specific probability for a given variable cannot be defined. Then...

Iraq experiences housing shortage of around 1–1.5 million units with low production rate. Managing this challenge requires integrated efforts across a number of fields. One way forward is to develop an integral and appropriate architectural solution. In Iraq, it remains unknown which of the possible architectural approaches is adequate to address i...

Heating operation can be automated using a timer/programmer and thermostat, manually controlled by occupants, or both. In ten UK dwellings, both automated and manual override heating events were identified from 30 minute time series data of living room air temperature measurements. Multivariate logistic regression was used to infer a model of occup...

The construction sector accounts for a significant portion of the total final energy use and carbon emissions worldwide. Despite efforts to reduce energy consumption through energy efficiency improvements in buildings, the measures proposed by the construction sector are falling short. Among several causes which lead buildings to perform differentl...

Uncertainty analysis in building energy assessment has become an active research field because a number of factors influencing energy use in buildings are inherently uncertain. This paper provides a systematic review on the latest research progress of uncertainty analysis in building energy assessment from four perspectives: uncertainty data source...

In underdeveloped countries, the lack of building energy consumption data makes it hard to decide upon interventions in the existing building stock. In order to overcome this difficulty this study develops a comprehensive framework to identify and analyse the energy saving potential of an existing building stock category. The methodology consists o...

Building performance is an important yet surprisingly complex concept. This book presents a comprehensive and systematic overview of the subject. It provides a working definition of building performance, and an in-depth discussion of the role building performance plays throughout the building life cycle. The book also explores the perspectives of v...

Iraq suffers from large housing problems. It is estimated that there is a shortage of around one million dwellings, which is equal to one-fourth of the total housing stock in the country. As a part of the solutions, the country needs architectural designs that satisfy three main conditions: enable an increase of the housing production, be affordabl...

Multi-disciplinary optimisation of building spatial designs is characterised by large solution spaces. Here two approaches are introduced, one being super-structured and the other super-structure free. Both are different in nature and perform differently for large solution spaces and each requires its own representation of a building spatial design...

The housing crisis in the UK, as Barker (2004) identifies, has become shorthand for a chronic lack of suitable and affordable housing—in both the home ownership and rental sectors—and the undersupply and diminishment of social housing stock (Barker 2004; Jefferys et al. 2014). What has also become clear, is that the mainstream housebuilding sector—...

Within the global trend of looking for energy efficient and environmentally comfortable buildings, the courtyard pattern has been investigated by many authors as an interesting solution for hot regions. Computer simulation tools have been used for this purpose, as they provide wide-ranging possibilities that cannot be obtained in field experiments,...

The courtyard pattern has been advocated to be thermally efficient for the hot-arid climatic zone. This paper investigates one of its environmental strategies: shading. By taking Baghdad as a case study, it presents an experimental study, using LightUp Analytics simulation tool, to determine the impact of courtyard geometry and orientation on its s...

The courtyard pattern provides a comfortable environment in hot regions through supporting natural ventilation and protecting buildings from solar radiation. But, its performance depends on its urban fabric compactness as it affects surfaces’ heat gain resulted from the solar radiation. The impact of urban compactness on urban shading is tested by...

Within the global trend of looking for energy efficient and environmentally comfortable buildings, the courtyard pattern has been investigated by many authors as an interesting solution for hot regions. Computer simulation tools have been used for this purpose, as they provide wide-ranging possibilities that cannot be obtained in field experiments,...

Building performance simulation (BPS) may provide valuable support to the planning of more energy efficient buildings, but the effort needed to create a complete model can hinder this potential. In particular, an idealized representation of HVAC systems is often used instead of a more explicit and insightful model, because of the difficulty of crea...

The courtyard pattern has been advocated to be thermally efficient for the hot-arid climatic zone. This paper investigates one of its environmental strategies: shading. By taking Baghdad as a case study, it presents an experimental study, using LightUp Analytics simulation tool, to determine the impact of courtyard geometry and orientation on its s...

Many researchers advocate readopting the courtyard pattern in hot climate regions for being more thermally efficient than the modern western ones, such as the detached housing. The courtyard helps through reducing heat gain and having sufficient natural ventilation to have a comfortable indoor environment. But, it is suggested that this building pa...

Occupant behavior is regarded as one of the major factors contributing to the discrepancy between simulation prediction and real energy use. Over the past several decades, occupants have been represented as fixed profiles of occupant presence in building energy simulation tools. Recently, stochastic models have been introduced to account for dynami...

This paper compares the actual energy performance of six flats and two houses built to low energy standards (Code for Sustainable Homes Levels 4 and 5) with a near identical flat and house built to minimum compliance only (Building Regulations). As low energy homes are only recently emerging in the United Kingdom housing stock, and even fewer are s...

Occupants’ behaviour has a significant impact on the energy performance of buildings. A good understanding of how occupants use a building provides a possibility of promoting the building's energy efficiency through changing occupant behaviour. Building simulation has been adopted as a useful method by building engineers for quantifying the effects...

The construction industry is often considered to perform poorly in terms of the quality of the products delivered when compared to other industries. However, developing and implementing quality management systems in construction is particularly difficult because of a lack of standardization, the intensive use of manual labour and the many parties i...

Housing represents one of the most important needs for people. In Iraq, there are large housing problems. It is estimated that there is a shortage of around one million dwellings, which is equal to one-fourth of the total housing stock in the country. As a part of the solutions to this problem, the country needs architectural designs that satisfy t...

Understanding the energy demand of cities is a challenge especially in countries such as Brazil where the lack of building energy consumption benchmarks makes it hard to decide upon interventions in the building stock, as neither the existing nor the attainable energy performance are known. Aiming to overcome these difficulties this study develops...

Building performance simulation (BPS) can provide detailed information on the thermal behaviour of buildings. Zoning is a key step in input data preparation for BPS. A simulation zone is typically composed of one or more rooms. Large spaces, such as open office spaces, may have multiple zones. Simulation zoning can be distinguished from HVAC zoning...

Developing and implementing quality management systems (QMS) in construction is particularly difficult because of a lack of standardization, the use of transient workforce and the many parties involved. This paper discusses the challenges faced by social housing providers in the UK when implementing quality assurance programs in their effort to pro...

Reducing household energy consumption can play a prime role in achieving the UK Government’s 2050 target for CO2 reduction. Research in the UK’s eViz project has demonstrated that visualizing energy information personal to the household, can promote energy saving behaviours amongst household occupants, recognizing that domestic energy usage can be...

Many buildings suffer from defects in the building envelope, such as missing insulation, thermal bridging, cracks and moisture problems. Thermography is one technology that can help to identify such defects. However, there are different approaches towards assessing the building envelope. Pass-by thermography is an emerging method, which is used to...

Occupants’ window opening behavior influences the performance of buildings significantly. Good window use can provide a comfortable indoor environment with a minimum energy use, while improper window use may result in bad indoor environment and may also waste great energy. This paper identifies improper window uses in an existing building in Beijin...

There is growing concern in Western Europe that higher insulation and air tightness of residential buildings leads to increased overheating risk. This paper discusses temperature monitoring from identical houses in the Southwest of the UK that were built to low energy standards (Code for Sustainable Homes Level 5). The temperature data were analyse...

Commercial buildings in Brazil consume approximately 16% of electricity energy use nationwide. The goal of this study is to explore and model the relationship of land use regulation, high-rise commercial building morphology and their energy use intensity in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The database from the local city council was used to ide...

Occupant behaviour has an important role in both the environmental performance and energy performance of buildings, which has been thoroughly demonstrated in the past several decades. Based on a review work, some research gaps have been identified in the area of occupants’ ventilation behaviour and to answer those gaps a field study was carried out...

The uncertainty in climate change predictions is an important factor in research into the impact of global warming on the thermal environment of buildings. This paper explores the impact of climate change on a domestic building in the UK, and assesses the measures that can be taken for better adaptation to such changes. Probabilistic climate change...

Monitoring of completed buildings often identifies significant gaps between the predicted and actual energy use of buildings. This is referred to as the ‘energy performance gap’. To date, most research on the energy performance gap has focussed on non-domestic buildings; this paper presents a case study from the UK domestic sector. Monitoring equip...

This paper introduces a longitudinal study monitoring occupants’ window opening behaviour in a mixed-mode office building in Beijing, China, when natural ventilation is specifically used for controlling the building’s indoor thermal environment. Based on the field measured data, the influence of factors, including outdoor air temperature, outdoor P...

Occupants’ window behavior influences the performance of buildings significantly. A good window usage can provide comfortable indoor environment, but improper window usage may result in bad indoor environment and may also cause energy waste. This paper identifies improper window usage based on year-long date collected from an office building in Bei...

There is growing concern in Western Europe that higher insulation and air tightness of residential buildings may lead to increased overheating risk during the summer. This risks undoing the energy savings as it may lead to the introduction of active cooling systems in buildings that so far have been cooled by natural means. This paper discusses tem...

This work presents the creation of a dynamic energy model able to simulate, with a reasonable workload, a very large number of integrated building-plant systems with different scales and resolutions, in order to have a design support for architects and designers, reducing their modeling effort and errors. The model includes the dynamic simulation o...