Conference Agenda

Conventional micro-environment studies often rely on static simulations in segmented areas, overlooking the sequential (transitional) and embodied nature of human experience during urban walks. Large-scale urban simulations, constrained by computational cost, typically sacrifice spatial resolution, while sensor- or survey-based field studies, although offering high fidelity, remain difficult to scale due to the time-intensive nature of participant experiments and data collection. As a result, early-stage urban design decisions—despite their long-term influence on pedestrian comfort—are still informed by largely static and location-based microclimate analyses, limiting their ability to capture the experiential continuity of walking.

This paper introduces a scalable “climate walk” computational framework that discretizes urban routes into micro-environmental segments, performing localized microclimate simulations and subjective comfort predictions at each step. By integrating walk scenarios, the method links sequential urban microclimate and outdoor thermal comfort parameters with perceived visual comfort, enabling site-specific and comparative analyses to inform early-stage urban design and comfort evaluation in complex environments.

This paper presents a framework that expands the URBANopt™ modeling platform to include 3D-printed concrete wall assemblies and assess energy efficiency and backup power trade-offs in new housing developments. Applied to a planned mixed-use neighborhood in Oil City, Pennsylvania, the workflow integrates building-energy and distributed-energy-resource (DER) modeling to evaluate envelope and equipment upgrades alongside DER operations. Results show that advanced 3D-printed envelopes combined with efficient systems and onsite PV and storage reduce energy use intensity and sustain critical loads during outages. The framework supports planning for emerging construction technologies by quantifying key trade-offs between energy efficiency and backup power performance.

This study develops a systematic framework for analyzing African residential building typologies across multiple climates. Through literature review and expert interviews, 49 representative buildings were consolidated into 16 envelope types and simulated across 34 systematically selected African cities, resulting in 544 scenarios. Results show that construction choice significantly impacts thermal comfort, with differences up to 2,650 discomfort hours annually in tropical and hot-dry climates. High thermal capacitance typologies, particularly earth-based constructions, consistently outperformed concrete masonry buildings. The findings highlight the thermal performance advantages of vernacular methods over prevalent concrete-based approaches, providing foundational data for climate-appropriate building guidelines in Africa's fast-urbanizing cities.

The radiant environment is a critical component in the evaluation of indoor and outdoor thermal comfort. Although the effects of short-wave solar radiation are well understood and included in microclimate studies, long-wave radiation from the sky and surrounding surfaces is often underestimated or overlooked, leading to incomplete or inaccurate assessments of thermal conditions. In this paper a methodology is proposed to address the challenges of simulating outdoor surface temperatures for real scenarios. Using the admittance method, it becomes possible to characterize material assemblies and predict outdoor surface temperatures under cyclic boundary conditions, namely, air temperature, sky temperature, incident radiation, and air speed. By applying Fourier analysis and analytical solutions in the frequency domain, the approach eliminates the need for mesh discretization and computation time typically required by finite element methods.

Ambient temperature thermal energy networks (ATTENs) maximize thermal energy sharing within a district energy system but create tightly-coupled thermo-hydraulic dynamics between the buildings and network. These dynamics make the ideal balance of computational speed and fidelity of building thermo-hydraulic systems (pipe distribution networks, flow dynamics, and equipment) unclear. To understand this tradeoff, this work develops two reduced-order models (ROMs) for building thermo-hydraulic systems and compares their prediction accuracy and computational speed to a detailed building model in an ATTEN. The ROMs simplify the detailed model by correlating heating and cooling demand with the amount of heat exchanged with the ambient temperature loop (ATL) and by simplifying the thermo-hydraulics of the pipe network connecting the building to the ATL. The ATTEN model with each ROM simulated 10.3 and 30.5 times faster than with the base building model. The associated normalized mean bias errors do not exceed ASHRAE Guideline 14 thresholds.