Let us plan for .. Intelligent Green Buildings of Tomorrow

ABSTRACT :
Adoption of Green Building Technology has become mandatory for ensuring sustainable development. However, its wide acceptance would require critical examination of various aspects like energy conservation, cost, strength and durability. Use of modern electronic controls and smart devices can enhance the functionality and performance of green building. Architects should get equipped with technical know-how for planning and designing intelligent green buildings to meet the future needs.
Need of Green Concept
Increasing urbanization has given a boost to building industry and number of bungalows, building complexes and multi-storied buildings are being designed by architects and engineers with innovative concepts and enhanced features. However, it is observed that in many cases, environmental aspects are ignored leading to uncomfortable habitat and increased maintenance and energy requirements. Green building concept needs to be realized by all concerned with building activity and studied in detail by designers and planners for better built environment.

Green or eco-friendly building is often considered as the luxury of wealthy people which is not correct. In fact, it is the necessity of common middle class man who cannot afford to provide air conditioning or pay exorbitant electricity bills. Beautiful landscape, greenery, gardens, soft lighting and high profile architecture with modern interiors is often mistaken to be the ideal house. Green building, on the other hand uses natural materials, utilizes natural ventilation and lighting and achieves energy conservation. Still the majority of buildings lack these features mainly because the builders generally give preference to appearance, economy of space and use of exotic materials. Owners and residents of buildings also realize the lack of comfort and high energy and maintenance requirements only after occupation of buildings.

Critical Appraisal of Green Technology
Green Technology is mandatory for ensuring sustainable development. However, in spite of all out awareness campaigns and promotional efforts, the adoption of this technology has remained marginal and restricted to environmentally conscious or wealthy people with main motive of value addition rather than economy and energy conservation.

In case of building industry, the green tagging of building enhances the value and supercedes other non-green competitors in attracting customers. The cost aspect of green building and loss of other functional requirements like security and durability are often concealed by green builders leading to a failure in convincing common man to adopt green building design. If we really wish to propagate the merits of green building, we must face the inconvenient questions of economy, security and strength put forward by traditional building practitioners and come up with solutions to make green building acceptable to all. It is necessary to examine every aspect of green building design in the light of its counterpart in traditional construction methods and evaluate the costs and benefits in totality. If such a scrutiny reveals superiority of green building, then only it can replace the traditional construction practice.

The main functions of the building are
1. To give shelter from environmental factors like Sun’s heat, rain, wind and extreme vagaries of nature like flood and hurricanes.
2. Provide security to life and property.
3. Provide privacy.
4. Durability and Strength.
5. Aesthetic beauty
6. Comfortable living

Civil engineering considers strength, durability and cost as the main criteria while selecting materials, planning and construction. Architecture gives more stress on aesthetics and comfort and pays attention to fulfilling psychological needs of occupants. Green building techniques seek to conserve and utilize natural resources, emphasize eco-friendly construction and think of minimum carbon footprint on global scale. Though all these approaches are justifiable in their own sense, choice of the material, construction method or type of building are governed mainly by economical and space considerations.

Integration of IT and Green Technology
Green building is need of tomorrow’s future and old methods of construction and use of natural materials though more eco-friendly cannot provide for the needs of tomorrow like space economy, security, modern gadgets and amenities and flexibility in energy management. Fortunately advances in IT and automation controls can make the green building intelligent providing security, energy conservation and weather responsive automated operations. Use of solar energy, LED lighting, Rainwater harvesting, preservation of indoor air quality and thermal comfort zone and waste minimization can be made highly effective and economical through sensor based controls and appliances. Intelligent buildings can protect and enhance the environment and adopt to the changing needs of the environment. Considering the high cost of energy and the need to preserve nature, intelligent buildings are increasingly becoming a necessity today.

Panorama of smart home appliances
Numerous smart control devices are available in market which can be deployed easily for ensuring security, comfort and for energy and water conservation. Restricted access control, intruder alarm, dimmer light controls, bluetooth, Wi-Fi and/or net enabled smart devices, smoke detector, sensor based plumbing fixtures, automatic controls for opening and closing of venetian shutters or blinds etc. Siemens, Tata Honeywell and ABB are some of the world’s largest producers of such controllers.

Coupled with it, there are variety of innovative products like wind powered fans, waterless urinals, dual flush latrines, Light tubes, LED lighting systems which can help in achieving green objectives.

Intelligent design suggests architecture whose enclosures, partitions, lighting, environmental systems, spatial characteristics and qualities can adapt to environmental dynamic situations. When the occupant or guest leaves the room, all electric gadgets are turned off, while the air condition turns to ‘low’.

Intelligent Green Buildings of Tomorrow
Energy, buildings, and the environment are interlinked in a symbiotic relationship, and the results of this interaction can be optimized for maximum gains by convergence of Green and Intelligent building concepts.

An intelligent building is one in which the building fabric, space, services and information systems can respond in an efficient manner to the initial and changing demands of the owner, the occupier and be in harmony with the environment. Intelligent buildings not only have energy efficiency but also have safety and telecommunications systems and other required automations propelled by innovations. Intelligent buildings are designed to increase efficiency of lighting, monitoring, safety & security, emergency systems, HVAC, door and window operations, guest registration and many more facets.

An intelligent building system concept recognizes that the true cost of the building is not its cost of construction; it must include the operating and maintenance costs over the structure’s life span. Intelligent buildings yield cost reductions over all these areas by optimizing energy use through automated control, communication and management systems. They also guard against repair costs, employee time, productivity loss, revenue loss and the loss of customers to competitors. The building can be viewed as a source of power and automation systems can execute new strategies to shift load and take pressure off of peak demand time.

Automation technology can be used to help utilities control and shift the demand for power at critical times and such automatic balancing of energy load over group of buildings can achieve significant reduction in energy demand. Smart buildings use energy in a clean and efficient way thus becoming green buildings. Though it is not in complete synchronization with the USGB’s LEED definition of green buildings, but in the larger context of energy and the environment, building intelligence may be more critical in future than many other factors.

Design of Intelligent Green Building
The ability to perform accurate whole building energy, water, and carbon emission analysis early during the design phase is essential for green building design. Simulating a building's energy use is a hard problem, requiring not only a model of the building and the materials that make it up but also a model of the building's location, with the path of the sun through the year and weather data that is accurate and detailed, including humidity, wind, simple daytime-nighttime temperatures, and a host of other location specific parameters.

There are many modeling and simulation tools for design of green building

1. Simplified Whole Building Energy simulation tools include: ASEAM, Carrier HAP, Energy-10 and TRACE 600.
2. Detailed simulation tools include: BLAST, DOE-2, ESP-r.
3. Lighting and Day lighting Simulation - ADELINE, RADIANCE, SUPERLITE
4. Solar System Simulation - TRNSYS
5. Ecotect is a whole-building simulator that combines an interactive building design interface and 3D modeller with a wide range of environmental analysis tools for a detailed assessment of solar, thermal, lighting, shadows & shading design, energy & building regulations, acoustics, air flow, cost & resource performance of buildings at any scale. It can be used as plugin in Autocad.
6. A computable Revit design model is a great fit for the analyses needed for sustainable design — even during schematic design. As soon as the layout of a building's walls, windows, roofs, floors, and interior are established, a Revit model can do whole building analyses.
7. Green Building Studio Web service meet ASHRAE Standard 140 and is certified by the U.S. Department of Energy. Built specifically for architects and using gbXML for data exchange across the Internet, the GBSWeb service can be used for building designs and sophisticated energy analysis.

Selection of a simulation program should consider the project requirements, time and cost, availability of computer system and experience of the user. Once the building completed and people use it, it should be monitored for the actual performance. Various sensors have to be used for such monitoring. This is called commissioning, and is crucial to the green building industry. Data from commissioning should be fed back into simulation programs, to make their models more accurate and complete.

Role of Green Architects
The architects should learn the basic concepts of green and eco-friendly building and make appropriate changes in methods and materials they are using for the building design. In order to achieve desired green rating, they should use modeling and simulation tools after necessary customization to suit client’s specific requirements and site constraints.
It is also necessary for the architects to get up to date knowledge of the modern electronic control systems that can be incorporated in the green building at design stage to enhance its utility, functionality and flexibility to respond to the changing environment and meet location specific requirements.

Role of Dnyandeep
Dnyandeep Education & Research Foundation has launched a website www.green-tech.biz to act as an effective medium for creating awareness about environmental protection and for popularization of green building/green city concept. The website includes all technical papers presented in the earlier workshops and seminars on this topic. It is proposed to have networking of architects and builders for information exchange and transfer of technical know-how.

The foundation is planning to provide all necessary guidance and training to architect members with the help of experts in Green Building Design, IT, Instrumentation and Control though this website.

Let us hope that with active participation from all concerned we will be able to usher a new era of intelligent green buildings affordable to all in future.