CIBSE TECHNICAL SYMPOSIUM 2019

Sheffield University hosted the 2019 CIBSE Technical Symposium, this event is interesting as it brings together people from a range of backgrounds including both professionals and academics. This provides a good opportunity for the cross pollination of ideas between sectors.

This also results in a broad range of subject areas which means that you’ll often discover a new perspective. It was really good to hear the importance of commissioning being discussed in a number of presentations including the main debate at the end of the first day so that discussion really moves on to how we make buildings work.

One speaker in this debate raised the fact that soft landings isn’t making a big impact on improving the performance of the built environment. I completely agree with this sentiment and have for a while felt that the soft landings process somewhat dilutes the optimisation of building systems. I would suggest that a focus on system optimisation during the long term operation of the building.

A number of speakers presented work on air quality which is a huge issue at the moment and getting significant attention in mainstream media given its impact on health. The building services industry are one of the key industries in responding to this issue and we need to decide how to engage with the challenge in a meaningful way. It’s a technically challenging area and care needs to be taken in terms of what is promised to building occupants in terms of health.

In the short term, a paper from WSP illustrated that one of the main factors on indoor air quality is proximity to the source, therefore considering the sources of pollution and where to locate air intakes is the most important element.

However. thinking holistically one of the key issues in improving air quality is to reduce NOx emissions. These are predominantly from the combustion of fuels including gas, therefore reducing heat consumption and switching to electric heating systems will eventually have a dramatic approach.

Another area which garnered much discussion is how to improve energy modelling, this included a proposal to introduce an accreditation system similar to the Australian system, NABERS, which involves much more detailed systems modelling. My concern with this is that whilst detailed modelling can provide insights useful for design decisions, the so called performance gap between compliance modelling and in-use energy is not the key problem we need to address. The overall target must be to reduce energy consumption.

NABERS has led to a significant reduction in the energy use by office buildings in Australia. The scheme also includes the requirement to record data about energy consumption and post it on a publicly available platform. I would suggest that is this aspect of the scheme which has a bigger impact than modelling.

Recording and analysing data about how a building actually works is the key to reducing consumption. For me the real gap we need to close is between how designers expected a building to work and how it is actually operating. This means much more time spent optimising control systems.

In many ways this was the underlying sentiment in my paper which you can read here and, for which, I was flattered to receive the conference’s award for best presentation. To summarise, my assertion is that we are still a long way away from buildings which are genuinely intelligent, but the coming wave of machine learning technology will allow systems to self-optimise leading to significant improvements in performance.

As a final note I felt that whilst there was much good work presented my sense is that we’re still not moving quickly enough and with sufficient urgency, I felt a number of the academic papers presented were addressing issues already well understood by industry such as the concept of unregulated energy and potential for energy storage. I think this speaks to a need for a much closer relationship between industry and academia which can ensure that research is targeted to efficiently addressing the industry’s biggest challenges.

 Notes:

Design, Build, System, UseDan Cash