Prashant Anand

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

The escalating frequencies and intensities of heat waves have become a global concern in the face of climate change. Cities are increasingly vulnerable to overheating due to the amplification of urban heat island (UHI) during heat waves. Factors influencing the synergetic impact of UHI and heat waves on the built environment are complex, mainly inc...

The presence of water molecules in the air can impact how super cool broadband radiative coolers behave. Higher humidity in the lower atmosphere traps infrared radiation, reducing heat sent back to outer space. In this study, a mesoscale urban climate model is used to evaluate the newly developed super cool materials with broadband emissivity not s...

As urbanization continues to accelerate globally, energy demand in cities is reaching unprecedented levels, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. In response, the concept of net-zero energy building (NZEB) is becoming a sustainable solution for urban energy needs. NZEB aims to achieve a net-zero energy footprint by balancing the energy it consu...

Energy demand fluctuations due to low probability high impact (LPHI) micro-climatic events such as urban heat island effect (UHI) and heatwaves, pose significant challenges for urban infrastructure, particularly within urban built-clusters. Mapping short term load forecasting (STLF) of buildings in urban micro-climatic setting (UMS) is obscured by...

A significant amount of global energy is expended to meet the cooling requirements in buildings. There has been a huge shift from naturally ventilated buildings to air-conditioning with an annual shift of 15.75% considering an overall increase in extreme heat incidences in cities during summer. Studies show that reducing cooling energy consumption...

Maintaining Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and ensuring the well-being of individuals in split air-conditioned indoor spaces such as bedrooms can be challenging, primarily due to the increased risk of airborne infection transmission and high CO2 concentration. To address these issues, pertinent guidelines recommend ensuring adequate ventilation with fres...

The research focuses on evaluating the impact of door and window orientation on thermal comfort during the summer months. Five different room types (Bedroom and living room) in different buildings, each representing a cardinal orientation and varying sizes of door and window openings, were selected for this study. The required time series data (at...

Extreme heatwaves in tropical cities represent a significant short-term weather challenge, directly impacting urban heat, exacerbating human discomfort, and increasing energy demands. To alleviate this, meteorological adjustments utilizing reflective roofing technologies, such as cool roofs, can effectively mitigate heatwave-induced excess heat and...

The large-scale deployment of rooftop photovoltaic solar panels (RPVSPs) may increase the risk of urban overheating due to a thermal convection developing between RPVSPs and roof surface. Therefore, it is crucial to develop a scientific understanding of the implications of large-scale RPVSPs in urban settings. This study examines the impact of RPVS...

Rapid urbanization in developing countries has come at great costs in terms of the increasing energy demand. As India is a developing nation, the rising per capita income, and increasing purchasing power of domestic alliances by households, are pushing the household energy demand to rise sharply. Thus, there is a need to move towards the implementa...

Overcooling or too high humidity issues may occur when the cooling coil in the central air-conditioning system is inadequate to meet both room temperature and humidity requirements, which might affect indoor thermal comfort, air quality, and building energy efficiency. Developing more advanced cooling coils to adapt to cooling load changes is one o...

Building Applied Photovoltaics (BAPV) such as Roof-top Solar PV has gained significant attention in recent years for harnessing the untapped potential of renewable energy sources. However, rooftop PV poses hurdles of space restriction and shadowing in densely packed urban residential neighborhoods. This study aims to design and assess the feasibili...

The cause-and-effect flow of various agents involved in airborne transmission of indoor air viruses has been investigated through a systematic literature review. It has been identified that the airborne virus can stay infectious in the air for hours, and pollutants such as particulate matter (PM10, PM2.5), Nitrogen dioxide (NO2), Sulphur dioxide (S...

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has taken a serious toll on humanity and mankind, affecting every section of society. Scientists are still trying to find out the possible transmission routes of this deadly virus, with airborne routes cited by many as a possible route of infection spread. Because airborne aerosols, dust particles, and other indoor poll...

Occupancy information is one of the crucial variables in modelling and predicting the energy use in buildings. However, the presence of occupants is often stochastic in nature. In the presented case of an institutional building, a substantial variation in the correlation between occupancy and energy consumption is found for different spacetypes dur...

Occupancy schedules and density can have a substantial influence on building plug, lighting, and air conditioning energy usage. In recent years, the study related to occupancy and its impact on building energy consumption has gained momentum and is also promoted by ASHRAE as it has created a multi-disciplinary group to encourage a comprehensive stu...

The performance of a low‐cost fan filter unit (FFU) in mitigating hazardous particulate matter (PM) levels in a naturally ventilated school classroom is presented. The FFU can be considered as a simplified mechanical ventilation and air‐conditioning system without heating and cooling functions. The FFU improves indoor air quality through introducti...

This paper presents a case study to compare the zone-level actual supplied ventilation rate with minimum required ventilation rate for a typical variable air volume (VAV) operation. The minimum required ventilation rate was computed using zone-level actual occupancy, plug and lighting load data. Two different algorithms were adopted to collect the...

Variable Air Volume (VAV) system serving multiple zones often shows energy wastage issues as it is not able to maintain ventilation requirements efficiently at part-load due to inaccurate assumptions of occupancy and inherent inability to detect and use actual occupancy in control. In this study, the operational data of a typical VAV system has bee...

The gap between the actual and intended energy use for a building is often attributed to stochastic behaviour of occupants. This study systematically investigates the relationship of occupancy with plug and lighting loads energy consumption for several spaces of an institutional building floor. A new parameter ‘Energy-use per person (K)’ is introdu...

Occupancy pattern is one of the main factors influencing building energy consumption and is highly stochastic. In the last few years, research has gained momentum to study and model the stochastic energy consumption pattern of occupants. Most of them discussed occupants within a specific space type (e.g., Office workplace) or activity type (e.g., o...

Air conditioning and mechanical ventilation systems may be oversized in commercial buildings in the Tropics. Oversized cooling coils may lead to reduced dehumidifying performance, indoor air quality and thermal comfort and increased energy consumption. In this paper, an adaptable cooling coil design is assessed with a general-purpose coil selection...

Occupancy plays a significant role in the amount of energy used in buildings and their presence is stochastic in nature. There is extensive evidence to suggest that buildings usually do not perform as well as predicted by energy simulation. Use of unrealistic occupancy data as an input of Building Energy Model (BEM) is a major reason behind it. Thu...

The purpose of the research is to evaluate performance improvement of photovoltaic (PV) integrated with green roof system due to evapotranspiration from plants. Evapotranspiration rate (ET) has been modeled by regression method to calculate latent heat flux generated which is responsible for reduction of cell temperature and improving efficiency of...

Thermal comfort aspects of indoor spaces are crucial during the design stages of building layout planning. This study presents a simplified tool based on thermal comfort using predicted mean vote (PMV) index. Thermal comfort simulations were performed for 14 different possible room layouts based on window configurations. ECOTECT 12 was used to dete...

With more urbanization in an island country of limited land area like Singapore, Urban heat island (UHI) is becoming a widely recognized phenomenon which is causing outdoor thermal discomfort to pedestrians and also causes high energy consumption by buildings. For a prospective residential development in Singapore, computational fluid dynamics simu...