Category Archives: Physics

Special Issue “Energy Performance and Indoor Climate Analysis in Buildings” available for free download

Our Special Issue with MDPI titled “Energy Performance and Indoor Climate Analysis in Buildings” (18 papers) is available for free download here: https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/book/1828
#Engineering #energy #Sustainability #Science #civilengineering

Special Issue “Energy and Technical Building Systems – Scientific and Technological Advances” now published

Our special issue with @MDPIOpenAccess “Energy and Technical Building Systems – Scientific and Technological Advances” (10 papers published) is now fully and freely available in pdf at https://www.mdpi.com/journal/energies/special_issues/energy_and_built_environment #Engineering #energy #energyefficiency #Sustainability #HVAC

“Sabbatical Leave” – a new track

“Sabbatical Leave” is the first tale of “The Adventures of Prof. Gideon Longbottom”. The evil researcher hates the world, and particularly his students with their smartphones always at hand. He therefore takes a Sabbatical leave to close himself into a laboratory in the cellar, for designing a weapon of mass destruction…with some (dark) humour.

Quantum Prana: vocals, lyrics, guitar, bass, programmed drums, production.
https://soundcloud.com/quantumprana/sabbatical-leave

————————————-
SABBATICAL LEAVE

Walking down the hall, the comedy plays
Students mocking me, “The hatchback will pay”
The rector won’t pay me regards
The faculty has only retards
Walking stick is carrying
My twisted proportions

My forehead is spacious
To accommodate grandeur
Massive head, naughty grin
My asymmetric chin
Showing the wasteland of my hatred for you

BURN! THEM ALL!
Petty dreams end in screams
Fire, your sins
BURN! THEM ALL!
The final resolution
Apocalypse of melted skin

Students check their smartphone
For quantum optics attention is gone
Spoiling little brats, technology
Life upon a display, making them restless

Your ignorance, your blessing
The final resolution

I’m taking my leave
Working in silence
In the cellar
Holding your smartphone
My grin on their display

BURN! THEM ALL!
Makeup and soaring screams
Flaming phones melt your skin
BURN! THEM ALL!
The final resolution
I’m gonna be a superstar!

(My) walking stick in flames
But I won’t care at all
Dancing on your graves
My twisted figure at the shopping mall

Delirium of the senses
The women will be mine
I shall just collect the pieces
Legs oh, will be carbonised
But after all, it will be fair!

Stepping down the stairs, cursing them all
You wonder why my laughing erupts
“That evil man has gone nuts!”

The dawn of my revenge
Sabbatical call

BURN! THEM ALL!
BURN! THEM ALL!
Revenge is nigh!

A new track, “Funky Matters”. An excursion into particle physics #nerdmetal

“Funky Matters” (a play with words) is a song/essay about the discoveries as well as the uncertainties of Particle Physics. Funk and jazz structures and rhythms develop on a metal arrangement, with clean singing and choruses to sing along with (lyrics below).
#nerdmetal

Quantum Prana: Vocals, guitar, bass; lyrics, production
Second Order Effects: Keyboards
Klas Granqvist: Drums
Special thanks to Elisa Mucciarelli and Tatu Hiltunen.

———————————————————————————
FUNKY MATTERS
Ancient Greeks figurin’ it all,
Democritos, the atoms, reduction to the call
Fundamental particles, grains of cosmology
Dividing life, by analogy, with our reality

Galilei’s method of induction
(Was) grounded on eye observation
Solitons / got noted / while ridin’ a horse
Newton and Huygens were fighting
Over new tools for understanding
How funky matters / make up the world
Aether was then invented
For light propagation
However the experiments, couldn’t confirm the equation

Einstein eventually, found the solution
Special relativity killed the funky matter
And gave us / Star Trek

Will string theory save us all?
Will we see the curvaton?
Quantum gravity for all!

—————–
CHORUS
Funky matters to all
Come on and join us / at / the / shopping mall
Warping space and time
Enter the quantum loop, and join the ride
—————-

We’re all cool funky matters
Dancing on warping dimensions
We all live under a Calabi-Yau
Supergravity takes the ball
Superpartner of the graviton
Radiative corrections
Are looping in the action
A new bunch of particles was then invented
But nobody has seen them in the Universe
Dark matter remains very dark
Though supersymmetry protects the Higgs

We all need a superpartner!
Will we see the dilaton?
Quantum gravity for all!
—————–
CHORUS 2
Funky matters to all
Come join us / at / the / shopping mall
We’re all cool funky matters
Hunting and searching / the grand unification
—————–
CHORUS 3
We’re all cool funky matters
Particle or wave, (it) doesn’t really matter
Warping space and time
Quantum gravity for all!

Presentation at the Trondheim conference now available for download

A short and coincise presentation I gave in Trondheim (Norway) on 7.11.19, which summarizes the parametric study reported in the conference paper (see the link below).

https://doi.org/10.1088/1755-1315/352/1/012011

Here is the presentation:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337111301_Parametric_study_for_the_long_term_energetic_performance_of_geothermal_energy_piles

 

Conference paper on geothermal energy now published

Here you can download the pdf (open access):

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/352/1/012011

I will give the talk next week at the 1st Nordic nZEB+ conference in Trondheim, Norway!

Abstract:
Geothermal energy constitutes an important renewable resource that will become increasingly prominent in future constructions. A common method of extraction and usage consists of installing, inside the foundation piles of buildings, U-shaped heat exchangers called ”energy piles”.

In this paper such installations are addressed by means of a full parametric study, performed for a hall-type commercial building in a cold climate. By computing the transient heat transfer between energy piles and ground for a period of 20 years, guidelines for a preliminary sizing of the geothermal system as a whole are provided. These are valid for this specific building and climate, for a clay-type soil and without assuming thermal storage.
A highly nonlinear behaviour of the expected yield in relation to pile separation and evaporator extraction power is observed. Furthermore, 15m-long piles are found to be more efficient than those with double length, a smaller extraction power seems to be more favourable and differences in the pile diameter have little impact for heat transfer. A geothermal system sizing guide, which is useful for a preliminary quantitative test prior to any installation, is introduced. Even though our specific results are valid only for a commercial hall-type building in Finland, our procedure is qualitatively general and can be utilized for any given building type and climate zone.

New paper on energy efficiency published

A new paper on the energy efficiency of buildings (here, ice hockey halls) is now published!

Title:
Energy analysis in ice hockey arenas and analytical formula for the temperature profile in the ice pad with transient boundary conditions

Abstract:
The energy efficiency of ice hockey arenas is a central concern for the administrations, as these buildings are well known to consume a large amount of energy. Since they are composite, complex systems, solutions to such a problem can be approached from many different areas, from managerial to technological to more strictly scientific. In this paper we consider heat transfer processes in an ice hockey hall, during operating conditions, with a bottom-up approach based upon on-site measurements. Detailed heat flux, relative humidity and temperature data for the ice pad and the indoor air are used for a heat balance calculation in the steady-state regime, which quantifies the impact of each single heat source. We also solve the heat conduction equation for the ice pad in transient regime, and obtain a general analytical formula for the temperature profile that is suitable to practical applications. When applied to the resurfacing process for validation, it shows good agreement with an analogous numerical solution. Since our formula is given with implicit initial condition and boundary conditions, it can be used not only in ice hockey halls, but in a large variety of engineering applications.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/kKUN792Us3j7QVgTpMpB/full?target=10.1080/17512549.2019.1615549

Paper on energy efficiency in buildings now published

Our paper “A combined analytical model for increasing the accuracy of heat emission predictions in rooms heated by radiators” is now published on the Journal of Building Engineering. Here is the link to the pdf (free download for the next 50 days):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235271021831413X?dgcid=author

Abstract:

The efficiency of heat emitters plays an important role in the improvement of building energy performance, especially in the context of system and product comparison. In particular, it can be directly related to thermal comfort via the operative temperature that is effectively sensed by the users.
For the first time in the literature, in this paper we develop a combined analytical model for room and radiator that computes directly the heat output required to maintain a specific operative temperature. The total heat balance of the enclosure is used to accurately quantify and compare the heat emission losses of different radiator types via an analytical calculation of the operative temperature. This determines the efficiency of a selection of panel radiators with different surface temperature, radiation fraction and number of panels, which were tested in a chamber conforming to the EN 442-2 standard.
Additionally, we assess the related annual energy consumption in different climates by carrying out annual simulations in old (without heat recovery) and new (with heat recovery) building types located in Tallinn, Estonia and Strasbourg, France. In the new building we find a similar performance for all the radiators. In the old building however, one radiator outperforms the other two with up to 1.38% lower annual energy consumption, due to smaller rear losses and higher thermal comfort provided by the larger front panel surface.