Polymer matrices were studied by scanning electron microscopy to identify the pore size distribution obtained in STMP crosslinked materials.
Mechanical compression and strain resistance tests allowed to evaluate monoliths potential as heat storage panels installed directly in buildings and greenhouses, STMP crosslinking products were identified by solid-NMR characterization, this allowed to synthetize monoliths at different crosslinking yields to find a formulation that improves PCM encapsulation. Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) studies allow to assess that encapsulation of butyl stearate onto matrices do not alter its phase change thermal properties. The influence of the drying process on the obtained composite materials morphology was studied indicating freeze-drying as the most effective technique. Polymer-bases were crosslinked with sodium trimetaphosphate (STMP) under alkaline aqueous conditions leading to an interconnected porous network.
The present contribution describes the research and implementation efforts that resulted in the release of a prototypical beta release of the SEMERGY environment (available in the World Wide Web via Emulsion-templated polymer based (pullulan, lining and hemicelluloses) monoliths encapsulating butyl stearate as bio-based phase change material (PCM) were synthesized.
SETAPP SPAREN SOFTWARE
These activities pertain to different fields of research, for instance building physics, building performance modeling, building construction, software engineering and evolutionary optimization research. These included a major background research on existing web-based tools, building performance assessment environments and requirements of potential users, the design of the general architecture of the SEMERGY environment, the generation of an adequate building data representation for data administration with regard to existing building data models, the utilization of semantic technologies for structured acquisition of relevant data for building performance assessment, the integration of and coupling with existing calculation and simulation engines, the generation of building component templates and alternatives building constructions, the integration of mathematical optimization techniques, the generation of data exchange routines with CAD/BIM-tools, and the design of a graphical user interface. To realize this environment several research and implementation activities were conducted. A fundamental design decision in the development of the environment was that existing resources of data and evaluation tools should be coupled with SEMERGY, rather than being engineer own developments. These include clients with little knowledge in the building construction domain that demand support for investment decisions in energy-efficient building design and retrofit and AEC-professionals looking for a fast-responding and easy to use design support tool to identify energy-efficient building planning and retrofit options. A major intention of the SEMERGY project was to generate an environment that offers decision support for different user groups. The SEMERGY project was conducted as a collaborative research effort by computer and building scientists of the Vienna University of Technology. Semantic web technologies enable systematic retrieval and reorganization of data from multiple sources, therefore these technologies could facilitate the fulfillment of informational requirements of performance-based building design. While the World Wide Web provides the majority of the necessary data, its utilization is hampered by the current unstructured and disorderly data representation and provision trends. The origin of this research incentive was the fact that current building planning and retrofit require a substantial amount of information, the lack of which hampers the integration of performance considerations in building design. This term is generated from the merging of the concept of semantic web and energy considerations, and illustrates the fundamental idea of the SEMERGY-project: Utilization of semantic web technologies for energy-centered building design evaluation and improvement. This development, which was carried out in the framework of a third party funded research project running from 2011 to 2015, was named SEMERGY.
This dissertation discusses the development of a web-enabled, optimization-based decision support environment for building design and retrofit.