
Ursula EickerConcordia University Montreal · Buildings Civil and Environmental Engineering
Ursula Eicker
Prof. Dr. habil.
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250
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4,589
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Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (250)
Landfills will likely remain an essential part of integrated solid waste management systems in many developed and developing countries for the foreseeable future. Further improvements are required to model the generated gas from landfills. The literature has not addressed detailed waste characterization in landfill gas (LFG) modeling by a first-ord...
Landfills will likely remain an essential part of integrated solid waste management systems in many developed and developing countries for the foreseeable future. This paper uses a genetic algorithm to fit parameters to a CH4 and H2S generation model independently based on a modified first-order decay model. In the case of CH4 generation modeling,...
Global warming is already significantly impacting communities, their health and infrastructure. Previous studies showed that climate change is making the earth warmer, which consequently affects the heating and cooling loads of buildings and their thermal performance. Therefore, it is beneficial to analyze how buildings respond to climate change in...
Transit agencies are increasingly embracing electric buses (EB) as an energy-efficient and emission-free alternative to the conventional bus fleets. They are rapidly replacing conventional buses with electric ones. As a result, emerging challenges of electrifying public transportation bus networks in cities should be addressed. Introducing electric...
Microgrids (MGs) can be used as a solution to ensure resilience against power supply failures in electricity grids caused by extreme weather conditions, unavailability of generation capacities, and problems with transmission components. The literature is rich in research focusing on strengthening the planning of microgrids based on overall load dem...
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been considered as a promising numerical approach in fluid dynamics problems, such as urban airflow prediction. However, airflow field prediction using CFD models is time-consuming. Thus, they cannot be used for (near) real-time and long-term simulations. Reduced-order models (ROMs) are emerged to obviate this...
One of the main required actions for moving forward in zero-carbon cities’ mission is to increase building energy efficiency. Building energy simulations are key tools for HVAC control, building energy management, testing different building energy efficiency scenarios, and providing feedback to the occupants. Unfortunately, these tools have a signi...
Due to computational barriers of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, they cannot be used for tasks such as (near) real-time simulations. Reduced-order model (ROM) can be used as an alternative to CFD since it can approximate the results in a fraction of the CFD simulation time. The present article generates a data-driven ROM, using convoluti...
The simulation of residential electricity load profiles (ELPs) has always played an important role for designing and evaluating energy systems for buildings or entire neighborhoods. Large-scale measurement data, the counterpart to these synthetic data, are often not available or only available at great expense in terms of time and under considerati...
The global demand for resources such as energy, land, or water is constantly increasing. It is therefore not surprising that research on the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus has become a scientific as well as a general focus in recent years. A significant increase in publications since 2015 can be observed, and it can be expected that this trend will...
This paper proposes a novel methodology to enrich the available Canadian residential archetypes with stochastic household profiles derived from statistical databases. The Canadian time use survey (TUS) data is used for developing a stochastic activity-based model to generate energy demand profiles of different households' compositions. The proposed...
Radiant floor systems offer significant potential for studying and developing energy flexibility
strategies for buildings and their interaction with smart grids. Efficient design and operation
of such systems require several critical decisions on design and control variables to maintain comfortable
thermal conditions in the space and floor surface...
Urban Green Spaces (UGS) offer various environmental benefits, including controlling the Air Quality Index (AQI), regulating outdoor thermal comfort, and providing suitable spaces for enhanced human health. Due to the high concentrations of pollutants in cities, especially particulate matters with a 2.5-micrometer diameter (PM2.5), various countrie...
In mounted photovoltaic (PV) facilities, energy output losses due to inter-row shading are unavoidable. In order to limit the shadow cast by one module row on another, sufficient inter-row space must be planned. However, it is not uncommon to see PV plants with such close row spacing that energy losses occur owing to row-to-row shading effects. Low...
In this paper, we present an approach on automatic energy system modeling and simulation. We develop two different methods to dimension the components of energy systems: one approach is an easy-to-use and to-adapt rule-based method, where the size of components is based e.g. on the heat demand of the buildings. The second approach is to dimension c...
Nowadays, traditional power systems are being developed as an emergence for the use of smart grids that cover the integration of multi-renewable energy sources with power electronics converters. Efforts were made to design power quality controllers for multi-renewable energy systems (photovoltaic (PV), Fuel Cell and Battery) to meet huge energy dem...
In the coming years, major transportation sectors will be electrified, in which more accessible and easy solutions for charging Electric Vehicles (EVs) become vital. Wireless charging is considered one of the best and easiest methods to charge EVs anywhere, even during the driving of cars. To get accurate charging power rates while charging wireles...
The current study presents methods to design heat pump energy systems using an automated workflow of building energy simulation and energy system parametrisation. The methods are applied to a case study of a mixed used complex located in Montreal, where the effects of using groundwater and surface water as heat sources for the heat pump system will...
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models have been used for the simulation of urban airflow and pollutant dispersion, due to their capability to capture different length scales and turbulence nature of the flow field. However, their high computational costs prevent them from being used for (near) real-time simulations, long-term predictions, and s...
Addressing the gap between available urban building data, energy performance evaluation, and spatial distribution of end-users is a growing concern of municipalities to support urban energy planning and retrofitting towards low carbon emission strategies. These days, many existing urban building energy models (UBEM) use the non-geo-specified 3D bui...
Construction material technologies are the driving force for enhancing and improving building and infrastructure functionality. Solutions for many challenges faced by the construction industry, such as low energy efficiency and high carbon emission, had sparkled from innovative construction materials technologies. Hence, selecting adequate construc...
Urban Green Spaces (UGS) offer various environmental benefits, including controlling the Air Quality Index (AQI) and providing suitable spaces for enhancing human health. This paper aims to provide models for designing canyons to reach clean and sustainable cities. These scenarios contain a pattern of greenery located on the streets. An attempt has...
Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) are one of the concepts developed to
reduce the impact of cities and districts on overall carbon emissions. Given the innovation brought by this concept, the implementation of PEDs comes with a series of challenges. These range from the high use of renewable energy sources, through the need of a positive balance at...
Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) have the potential of accelerating the decarbonization of urban areas and promoting scalability between cities. The development and real-world implementation of such innovative concepts can be enhanced through urban energy modelling. However, assessing PEDs can be challenging, and information on this topic is scarce...
Energy storage systems are an inevitable technology in our day-to-day life at different capacities ranging from small scale capacitors and mobile batteries to a larger scale district heating network connecting multiple energy centers in a city. Especially as the renewables becoming the preferred energy source in many nations for several reasons, en...
Occupant-related inputs are significant parameters that influence energy simulation accuracy at both the building and urban levels. In most previous research works, fixed occupant schedules were used in urban-scale building energy modeling. The main reason is the lack of data availability to model the dynamic occupancy schedules. In recent years, u...
There is growing interest in energy mapping amongst municipal planners and policymakers to accelerate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction program implementation. Responding to this interest partly involves addressing challenges related to building stock data collection and processing. The present study, carried out in conjunction with Natural...
Cities play an essential role in energy consumption and its environmental impacts. Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) can help optimize the built environment's energy efficiency and improve the design and operation of building energy systems. In order to develop UBEM, individual buildings' characteristics such as constructions, internal loads, e...
High penetration levels of Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) could cause stress on the network and might violate the limits and constraints under extreme conditions, such as exceeding power and voltage limits on transformers and power lines. This paper defines extreme conditions as the state of a load or network that breaks the limits of the constra...
Optimal load dispatching plays a vital role in improving the reliability and efficiency of renewable energy systems. This research presents a Mixed‐Integer Linear Programming (MILP) approach for optimizing a power system's daily operational cost while increasing its resilience, including a wind turbine, battery, and conventional grid. Deep learning...
Occupants' thermostat setpoint preferences play a vital role in HVAC systems' operation and significantly influence the building energy performance. However, despite the diversity in indoor temperature preferences, most building energy codes assume identical thermostat setpoints for buildings of the same type. To this end, this study aims to demons...
To date, the assessment of the energy flexibility to be delivered by existing buildings and by their legacy HVAC systems is hindered by a lack of commonly agreed-upon methodologies. There are many research works in the field; however, many of them are focused on the design stage or, in case of addressing building operation, they are based on contro...
This paper proposes an original multi-criteria decision-making optimization algorithm to select the best solar panels in an existing market and optimally size the photovoltaic (PV) system for an electric vehicle parking lot (EVPL). Our proposed algorithm is called rank-weigh-rank (RWR), and it is compared to the well-known technique for order of pr...
The paper explains a workflow to simulate the food energy water (FEW) nexus for an urban
district combining various data sources like 3D city models, particularly the City Geography
Markup Language (CityGML) data model from the Open Geospatial Consortium, Open
StreetMap and Census data. A long term vision is to extend the CityGML data model by
deve...
The transition of the transportation sector from internal combustion engine vehicles to battery electric vehicles (EVs) will heavily increase the energy demand on the network, causing severe techno-economic problems. To solve these issues, advanced charging strategies were proposed to reduce the EVs’ charging impact on the network. The problem aris...
Time-resolved, occupancy-dependent electricity load profiles at building level for city quarters or entire cities are important for planning authorities, project developers, utilities or other stakeholders in order to develop energy saving strategies and meet climate targets. Firstly, this information enables a more accurate modelling of renewable...
The importance of climate protection and sustainability is steadily increasing all over the world. However, there is a large potential for reducing emissions in the heating demand reduction and renewable heat supply of buildings that needs to be addressed. Therefore, a method was developed within the scope of this work that allows local decision-ma...
Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) may not be able to solve network issues, especially in the presence of high penetration level of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and decentral renewable energy. To solve the problem, Grid Energy Management Systems (GEMSs) were introduced. However, because of the contradictory nature of the main objectives of HEMS whic...
Eine nachhaltige Wärmeversorgung von Bestands- und Neubauquartieren kann maßgeblich dazu beitragen, die klimapolitischen Zielsetzungen Deutschlands und der EU zu erreichen. Der 3D-Gebäudeenergie-Workflow-Manager SimStadt hilft dabei, die energetische Quartiersplanung zu vereinfachen.
The growing urban population globally leads to higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and stress on the electricity networks for meeting the increasing demand. In the early urban design stages, the optimization of the urban morphology and building physics characteristics can reduce energy demand. Local generation using renewable energy resources is...
At a global level, the need for energy efficiency and an increased share of renewable energy sources is evident, as is the crucial role of cities due to the rapid urbanization rate. As a consequence of this, the research work related to Positive Energy Districts (PED) has accelerated in recent years. A common shared definition, as well as technolog...
Designing district-scale energy systems with renewable energy sources is still a challenge, as it involves modeling of multiple loads and many options to combine energy system components. In the current study, two different energy system scenarios for a district in Montreal/Canada are compared to choose the most cost-effective and energy-efficient...
Nowadays, there are several thousand solar panels (SP) in the market. These panels vary in size, efficiency, cost, warranty, technology, etc. Selecting the best SP becomes complicated when other factors are added to the list, such as the available roof area, weather conditions, electricity tariffs, energy consumptions, etc. Therefore, it becomes cr...
The increased integration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) into the distribution network can create severe issues—especially when demand response programs and time-varying electricity prices are applied, EVs tend to charge during the off-peak time to minimize the electricity cost. Hence, another peak demand might be created, and other solutions are requi...
An integrated urban platform is the essential software infrastructure for smart, sustainable and resilient city planning, operation and maintenance. Today such platforms are mostly designed to handle and analyze large and heterogeneous urban data sets from very different domains. Energy modeling and optimization functionalities are usually not part...
Building stocks account for a large share of energy consumption and harbour great potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The field of urban building energy modelling (UBEM) offers a range of approaches to inform climate protection policies, producing output of different granularity and quality.
We compare two typology-based (archetype) ap...
The aim of the present paper is to develop a reliable and accurate model of the wastewater biochemical treatment process and to explore the behaviour through a general dynamic simulation environment, namely the INtegrated Simulation Environment Language (INSEL), for the analysis of the energy demand of the whole wastewater treatment plant. In parti...
The aim of the present paper is to investigate the influence of electricity tariffs on energy flexibility in buildings and associated energy costs. A residential building located in Stuttgart, Germany, equipped with a hybrid heat pump which is coupled with a thermal energy storage unit and a gas boiler is used as a case study. A model predictive co...
An integrated urban platform is the essential software infrastructure for smart, sustainable and resilitent city planning, operation and maintenance. Today such platforms are mostly designed to handle and analyze large and heterogeneous urban data sets from very different domains. Modeling and optimization functionalities are usually not part of th...
Reducing CO2 emissions by improving energy efficiency
and integrating renewables while offering a high quality of
living and working in neighborhoods and campuses, is the
declared aim of the threeGermancase studies described in this
paper. The focus is to assess and analyze the different phases of an energetic retrofitting: planning, construction a...
Zero or plus energy office buildings must have very high building standards and require highly efficient energy supply systems due to space limitations for renewable installations. Conventional solar cooling systems use photovoltaic electricity or thermal energy to run either a compression-cooling machine or an absorption-cooling machine in order t...
High fluctuations of renewable energy sources, such
as wind and solar energy, require storage capacity to maintain
supply reliability. For long term storage energy carriers to
substitute fossil fuels must be found. The reduction of carbon
dioxide to liquid substances such as formic acid or formate
with electrons from renewable energy sources seem t...
3D city models are increasingly used for heating demand analyses at urban scale. Many studies have been done for standardization of required attribute data for energy analysis of buildings. The U-values which can be derived from the building age are one of the main influencing attributes for heat demand modelling. The question remains how building...
Urban platforms are essential for smart and sustainable city planning and operation. Today they are mostly designed to handle and connect large urban data sets from very different domains. Modelling and optimisation functionalities are usually not part of the cities software infrastructure. However, they are considered crucial for transformation sc...
Presently, there are substantial financial efforts to improve heating plants’ control and system optimisation based on heat load predictions. In this paper two methods for heat load predictions in urban areas are demonstrated. The first one is an in-house Urban Energy Platform called SimStadt, which is based on 3D CityGML buildings models and its c...
Many urban simulation tools focus mainly on the calculation of space heating (SH) demand and not on the domestic hot water (DHW) demand. Instead, DHW is often assumed as an always constant value that does not change during the day or year. In this paper, the importance of differentiated, hourly domestic hot water profiles for residential buildings...
The present paper introduces an iterative methodology to progressively reduce building simulation model complexity with the aim of identifying potential trade-offs between computational requirements (i.e., model complexity) and energy estimation accuracy. Different levels of model complexity are analysed, from commercial building energy simulation...
de Der folgende Beitrag befasst sich mit der Tageslichtwirkung eines transluzenten, thermisch gedämmten Membrandaches über einer Sporthalle aus energetischer Sicht. Anhand von Messungen der optischen Eigenschaften der ausgeführten Dachkonstruktion wird eine dynamische Tageslichtsimulation der realisierten Situation über ein Jahr durchgeführt. Weite...
In the paper, a method was developed to automatically dimensionalize and calculate central energy generation and supply scenarios with a district heating system for cities based on 3D building models in the CityGML format and their simulated heat demand. In addition, the roof geometry of every individual building is used to model photovoltaic energ...