On October 27^th, Annex 80 scientists, practitioners, and planners as well as representatives from the building cooling associated industry gathered for the 3^rd meeting of the Advisory Board of Practitioners. This board, an initiative of Annex 80, AIVC and venticool, was founded to put results of scientific research into action by establishing strong ties to practitioners and to include their practical experience in future research projects.

Around 20 participants attended the meeting which dealt with the topic of “Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of resilient cooling”. After two presentations, one from Peter Holzer – Annex 80 operating agent on “Technical Metrics from EBC Annex 80 Resilient Cooling of Buildings” and another one from Abdelaziz Laouadi – National Research Council Canada (NRC) on “Metrics of comfort and heat stress for overheating risk analysis in buildings” (NRC report), the participants were split into small groups and formed break-out sessions.

Questions such as the following were discussed:

• Which KPIs do you apply in your practice already?
• Order the list of KPIs. Which ones do you consider most important and why?
  • A Comfort (e.g., Hours of Exceedance, PMV, PPD)
  • B Health (e.g., Passive Survivability, SET, PHS)
  • C Socio economic (e.g., recovery time)
  • D Environment (e.g., t CO2 equ.)
  • E Energy (e.g., SCOP, SEER)
• Do you consider the health/heat stress of occupants and how do you address this topic in your design practice?
• Do you think there is a need to adapt KPIs and threshold values of cooling systems in future legislation and standards?
• Do you think the importance of a “resilience” KPI will increase/decrease/stay the same?

 

Following a 20 min discussion among the different groups, the members rejoined to share their outcomes.

Next meetings

Meeting 04: December 15^th, 2021

“Future weather data for building simulation”

• Generation of future weather data
• Evaluation of extreme heat events
• Application in building simulations

 

Meeting 05: Spring 2022 

“Evaluation of Resilient Cooling Solutions in four fields of application”

•  Reduce heat loads to people and indoor environments
• Remove sensible heat from indoor environments
• Enhance personal comfort apart from space cooling
• Remove latent heat from indoor environments

 

For further information, please contact Philipp Stern at philipp.stern@building-research.at