Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar... (gizmodo.com)

Don't know which to find more interesting at this point. The apparent improvement in solar energy collection. A vertical wall seems like an easy thing to do better than.  And the Notion that  nature understands Fibonacci...

M

Genius 13-Year-Old Has a Solar Power Breakthrough
http://gizmodo.com/5832557/

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New Zealand Snow: Biggest Snow... (huffingtonpost.com)

Gotta love the idea that snow is so special!

New Zealand Snow: Biggest Snowfall In Last 30 Years Delights People In The Street
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/16/new-zealand-snow_n_928293.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

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A comic about the real scienti... (boingboing.net)

Now this is fun. 

A comic about the real scientific process
http://boingboing.net/2011/08/03/a-comic-about-the-real-scientific-process.html?dlvrit=36761

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Emergent Design-Air Flow Analysis 1

I fully expected something with a title of 'Emergent design' to be at the very least Digital. It is after all spawned by studies of the digital and lead to "a theoretical framework... for investigating how choice of design methodology contributes to the success or failure of education reforms."

Instead it appears to be the use of a very large model and a cooling fan to study the potential for natural ventilation / wind driven air flow.

Air Conditioning

This post is about two things - a talk on Passive Cooling in Malaysia and this extract from an email that i received today:
Attire
Conference attire is business casual. We recommend bringing a jacket or sweater (the conference rooms are air-conditioned) and comfortable shoes for the walk between the [conference hotel name] Hotel and the Conference Center.

At the presentation by a visiting colleague from Malaysia on alternatives to air conditioning in large buildings in Malaysia, it was noted that for passive cooling to work one needs reliable air movement and this is not available in much of urban Malaysia. Even in areas where breezes occur, one needs tallish buildings to rise above the shelter provided by other structures to be exposed to the wind. This suggest some issues of privilege where passive cooling is only for those rich enough to be able to afford to live at a high level. However, what interested me was the temperature set points and comfort in Malaysia: questions of persuading people to lift the set points of their chiller to 24C instead of 22C! In the temperature measurement studies, with passive cooling the spaces being cooled were at 26-28C! This would suggest that passive cooling is an impossible goal - never achieving 'comfort'. Or perhaps - using the the adaptive comfort model [Brager and de Dear (DOI: doi:10.1016/S0378-7788(97)00053-4 Energy and Buildings Volume 27, Issue 1, February 1998, Pages 83-96) ] - we behave differently in air conditioned as opposed to naturally ventilated buildings.

So, coming back to the conference email, someone like myself who has very little day to day experience of air conditioning, and is therefore adapting to my hotel room internal climate needs this type of warning because in my experience the conference seminar room air con is freezing. What these people are saying is that it is so cold in the conference seminar rooms you will need to wear a jacket to stay comfortable! I cannot help but think we might be able to develop a huge window of energy availability by altering thermostat settings on chillers in cold climates. I have recently in China experienced the awfulness of air con: walk the streets and suffer in high humidity and 35+C temperatures. Walk into a shop - though the wide open door and feel so cold that a jersey is needed. This is just plain insanity.

On a rough calculation: if the temperature outside is averaging 34C and inside is set to 22C - then the savings of a 28C set point are around 50%! And I believe that the adaptive temperature studies suggest that people would not be less comfortable - they might even be less stressed, not having to cope with such extremes of temperature inside and out.

Green Museums - a possibility?

The Art Newspaper -- New A brief article in "the Art Newspaper" on the value of 'going green' even in museums. The classic argument that has been promoted by conservators for many years has been that the stringent conditions under which art 'must' be stored are the reason for the highly serviced spaces and hence high energy use of museums. That there might be alternatives to this approach has been discussed, but never proven.

The oft-quoted Gary Thomson book on 'The Museum Environment" can be blamed for a lot: drawers full of unanalysed thermo-hygrograph charts in conservators' offices; the tyranny of the 55%+/-3% RH and 21 degrees C +/- 1degC recommended Humidity and Temperature; but sadly its considerable discussion of the buffering of temperature and more particularly humidity has mostly been restricted in Museum environments to management of storage and display case environments. Unlike the trivial once-over-lightly tone of the Art Newspaper article - a standard journalistic overview of a topic that mentions the US LEED scheme but mentions nothing about the building design. However, it is now possible to find articles on use of building design to manage the internal environment, such as this self-published article: How to design Climatically Stable Museums by Tim Padfield a 'retired museum scientist'.

Back in 1981 and again in 1985 I was involved in the production of two reports on major institutions in New Zealand which were of a design that made their internal environments extremely stable. In one case, the building had no heating system and yet maintained conditions for most of its aretefacts that arguably were better than those now experienced by the artefacts with a full humidity control HVAC system installed. 600mm thick masonry walls, low ventilation rates, large volumes of air and display cases with large areas of internal surfaces of unpainted or unvarnished wood made for thermohygrograph readings that were much more stable than can ever be achieved by electronically controlled on/off running of mechanical plant responding to the changes in the internal conditions in a normal highly insulated / highly serviced box. There was a space in one of these buildings that was conditioned and one could notice the 1 to 1.5 degree drop in temperature below the set point before the heating plant turned on and then a total 3 degree rise before the temperature was 1-1.5degC above the set point and the heating turned off. During this same time the naturally conditioned spaces did not vary noticeably - the graphs were so flat as to appear at first glance to be faulty!

I have been offering this idea as a research topic for students for many years now, to no avail... Some day?