Análisis de ciclo de vida de una nueva solución arquitectónica que mejora el rendimiento térmico de la envolvente del edificio: fachada natural aljibe. Life Cycle Assessment of a new architectural solution that improves the thermal performance of the building envelope: Natural Green Tank Façade

Análisis de ciclo de vida de una nueva solución arquitectónica que mejora el rendimiento térmico de la envolvente del edificio: fachada natural aljibe.

Testing the performance of a green wall system on an experimental building in the summer

It is known that a green wall brings some advantages to a building. It constitutes a barrier against solar radiation, thus decreasing and delaying the incoming heat flux. The aim of this study is to quantify such advantages through analytical comparison between two facades, a vegetal facade and a conventional facade. Both were highly insulated (U-value = 0.3 W/m2K) and installed facing south on the same building in the central territory of Spain. In order to compare their thermal trend, a series of sensors were used to register superficial and indoor air temperature. The work was carried out between 17th August 2012 and 1st October 2012, with a temperature range of 12°C-36°C and a maximum horizontal radiation of 1020 W/m2. Results show that the indoor temperature of the green wall module was lower than the other. Besides, comparing superficial outdoor and indoor temperatures of the two walls to outdoor air temperatures, it was noticed that, due to the shading plants, the green wall superficial temperature was 5 °C lower on the facade, while the bare wall temperature was 15 °C higher. The living wall module temperature was 1.6 °C lower than the outdoor, while the values of the conventional one were similar to the outdoor air temperature.

Forest Hydrology, Soil Conservation and Green Barriers in Canary Islands

In volcanic islands, the rainfall regime and its torrential nature, together with the steep slopes and the soil types present are considered to be some of the main factors affecting forest hydrology and soil conservation. In such environments, rain regime is generally irregular and characterized by short and intense rainfalls, which could cause destructive flows at times, followed by long periods of rain absence. The volcanic nature of these islands have as a direct resultant steep slopes which influences the runoff volume and speed, as well as the amount of topsoil susceptible to be detached and transported downstream. The soil type also affects the susceptibility to erosion processes. Andisols are the most typical soil on volcanic islands. Their particularities derive their mineral constituents, called short-range-order products, which provide these soils with an increased structural stability, which in turn reduces their susceptibility to erosion. However, the land use changes and the environmental factors such as rain regime and steep slopes may be determinant factor in destabilizing these soils and ultimately a cause for soil erosion and runoffs, which become a threat to the population downstream. Green barriers have been traditionally used to prevent or reduce these processes, also to enhance the dew effect and the fog water collection, and as a firebreak which acts as a barrier to slow or stop the progress of a wildfire. Wooded species present and subsequently their performance have a major influence on their effectiveness. The use of this natural erosion and fire control methods on volcanic islands is discussed in this paper.

Ubiquitous green computing techniques for high demand applications in smart environments

Ubiquitous sensor network deployments, such as the ones found in Smart cities and Ambient intelligence applications, require constantly increasing high computational demands in order to process data and offer services to users. The nature of these applications imply the usage of data centers. Research has paid much attention to the energy consumption of the sensor nodes in WSNs infrastructures. However, supercomputing facilities are the ones presenting a higher economic and environmental impact due to their very high power consumption. The latter problem, however, has been disregarded in the field of smart environment services. This paper proposes an energy-minimization workload assignment technique, based on heterogeneity and application-awareness, that redistributes low-demand computational tasks from high-performance facilities to idle nodes with low and medium resources in the WSN infrastructure. These non-optimal allocation policies reduce the energy consumed by the whole infrastructure and the total execution time.