New Trends of Sustainability in Civil Engineering and Architecture Ⅱ

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2021) | Viewed by 12438

Special Issue Editors

Department of Civil Engineering, University of Alicante, P.O. Box 99, E-03080 Alicante, Spain
Interests: building materials; concrete; mortars; aggregates; lightweight concrete; waste management; ultrasonic measurement; durability; sustainable cementitious materials; bituminous mixes; construction engineering; sustainable construction
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Instituto de Matemática Multidisciplinar, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n, E-46022 Valencia, Spain
Interests: sustainable bituminous mixes; ultrasound as nondestructive characterization; maintenance and instrumentation of sustainable structures; infrastructures for sustainable transport
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The global concern for climate change, global warming, and increasing pollution has made it imperative for the policy makers throughout the world to devise green strategies for a sustainable future. Within this context, the Civil Engineering and Architecture fields play an important role in reaching that aim.

The construction industry remains a major target for environmental sustainability due to its consumption of the largest portion of materials resources, water, and energy and contributing to landfill sites. The sustainability of the industry depends on how well it manages waste minimization, durability of the materials used (contributor to sustainability due to the high environmental impact of maintenance, repairs, and replacement), and reducing waste during the construction, but also using green materials, lessening energy consumption, saving water, and preserving indoor quality, among others. Therefore, several possible strategies to perform a sustainable action in the construction industry go through reducing, reusing, and recycling residues, which once processed can become profitable alternatives for being used as building materials, with the added value of increasing the lifetime of landfills and requiring a lower extraction of natural raw materials.

Furthermore, within civil engineering and architecture, urban development, mobility, and transportation are important areas of study, in which there is a wide scope for developing strategies related to sustainability, especially focused on the reduction of CO2 emissions. In addition to this, it is important to emphasize the increasing use of the relatively recent building information modeling (BIM) methodologies, which will be also very useful in managing sustainability aspects related to construction projects in the near future. That is why promoting sustainable policies regarding civil engineering and architecture are becoming extremely important nowadays.

In 2019, the first edition of the Special Issue “New Trends of Sustainability in Civil Engineering and Architecture”, conducted by this team of guest editors, was developed with success and had a good reception by researchers. With the present second edition of this Special Issue of the journal Applied Sciences, our intention is to give continuity to the abovementioned first volume, welcoming research papers reporting studies, strategies or practical cases related to sustainability in the civil engineering and architecture fields.

Prof. Dr. José Marcos Ortega
Prof. Dr. Antonio José Tenza-Abril
Prof. Dr. Teresa Real-Herraiz
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • Sustainable cement-based materials
  • Eco-friendly construction and building materials
  • Sustainability assessment related to civil engineering applications
  • Infrastructures for sustainable transport
  • Integration of BIM for sustainable construction
  • Sustainable mobility and transportation
  • Structures for renewable and green energies
  • Sustainable construction management
  • Building and structures life-cycle analysis
  • Environmental impacts of sustainable construction
  • Real experiences of construction projects and works with a contribution to sustainability
  • Sustainable urban development
  • Sustainability in marine and hydraulic structures
  • Green building project management

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

22 pages, 1968 KiB  
Article
Perceived Benefits of Energy Efficiency in the Spanish Residential Market and Their Relation to Sociodemographic and Living Conditions
by Eva Crespo Sánchez, Silvia Spairani Berrio, Belén Onecha Perez and Carlos Marmolejo-Duarte
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11(2), 875; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/app11020875 - 19 Jan 2021
Cited by 10 | Viewed by 2567
Abstract
Within the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive information symmetry regarding financial and environmental benefits, coming from real estate performance, is a key element in the promotion of efficient buildings. However, the link between energy efficiency and its perceived co-benefits is far from perfect [...] Read more.
Within the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive information symmetry regarding financial and environmental benefits, coming from real estate performance, is a key element in the promotion of efficient buildings. However, the link between energy efficiency and its perceived co-benefits is far from perfect in EU countries with a short trajectory in the promotion of such residential attributes, endangering the efficacy of information-symmetry policies. Using a large survey applied to sellers, buyers, lessors and tenants this paper explores, in Spain, the perceived co-benefits in terms of energy savings and thermal comfort of efficient homes and whether such perception correlates to current living conditions, housing tenure and sociodemographic profile of respondents. Results suggest that in general such co-benefits are present in the mind of the main agents of the housing market. However, their perception is far from being homogeneous, it is clearer in the case of households whose current home is poorly insulated or inadequately serviced in terms of thermal active systems. Sociodemographic conditions also play a role in co-benefits perceptions: Elder, wealthier and landlords, irrespective of whether they act as sellers, buyers or lessors, do perceive to a larger extent the co-benefits of efficient homes. Such findings signal clear paths for the improvement of energy and housing policy. Full article
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24 pages, 13426 KiB  
Article
A Novel Cooperative Controller for Inverters of Smart Hybrid AC/DC Microgrids
by Bilal Naji Alhasnawi, Basil H. Jasim, Walid Issa and M. Dolores Esteban
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(17), 6120; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/app10176120 - 03 Sep 2020
Cited by 23 | Viewed by 2647
Abstract
This paper presents a novel cooperative control technique concerning fully-distributed AC/DC microgrids. Distributed generation based on inverters has two types, i.e., Current Source Inverter (CSI), also referred to as PQ inverter, and Voltage Source Inverter (VSI). Both inverter forms have a two-layer coordination [...] Read more.
This paper presents a novel cooperative control technique concerning fully-distributed AC/DC microgrids. Distributed generation based on inverters has two types, i.e., Current Source Inverter (CSI), also referred to as PQ inverter, and Voltage Source Inverter (VSI). Both inverter forms have a two-layer coordination mechanism. This paper proposes a design method for the digital Proportional-Resonant (PR) controller that regulates the current inside an inverter. The inverters will improve the voltage quality of the microgrid while maintaining the average voltage of buses at the same desired level. There is comprehensive detail on the computations specific to resonant and proportional gains and digital resonance path coefficients. The paper includes a digital PR controller design and its analysis in the frequency domain. The analysis is based on the w-domain. The main contribution of this paper is the proposed method, which not only focuses on the transient response but also improves the steady-state response which smoothens the voltage; furthermore, all inverters are effectively involved to increase the capacity of the microgrid for better power management. The suggested cooperative control technique is used on an IEEE 14-bus system having fully distributed communication. The convincing outcomes indicate that the suggested control technique is an effectual means of regulating the microgrid’s voltage to obtain an evener and steady voltage profile. The microgrid comprises distributed resources and is used as the primary element to analyse power flow and quality indicators associated with a smart grid. Lastly, numerical simulation observations are utilised for substantiating the recommended algorithm. Full article
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17 pages, 3162 KiB  
Article
Construction Safety Risk Assessment for Existing Building Renovation Project Based on Entropy-Unascertained Measure Theory
by Wenlong Li, Qin Li, Yijun Liu, Huimin Li and Xingwang Pei
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(8), 2893; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/app10082893 - 22 Apr 2020
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 4306
Abstract
With the development of society, there are more and more existing building renovation projects. According to the common construction safety problems, and based on the characteristics of the construction process of renovation project, this paper established a construction safety risk assessment model of [...] Read more.
With the development of society, there are more and more existing building renovation projects. According to the common construction safety problems, and based on the characteristics of the construction process of renovation project, this paper established a construction safety risk assessment model of renovation project based on entropy-unascertained measure theory. Firstly, the assessment index system was determined by risk identification and analysis. Secondly, the unascertained measure theory was applied to the construction safety risk assessment of renovation project, and the weight of each index was determined by the entropy weight method. Finally, taking the actual renovation projects as examples to calculate its safety risk grade, it is found that the assessment results of the model are basically consistent with the actual situation of the site by comparison. The research shows that the model can provide a new idea to quantitatively assess the construction safety risk of renovation project and provide a reliable basis for the management and control of the construction safety of existing building renovation project. Full article
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15 pages, 4748 KiB  
Article
Short Term Traffic Flow Prediction of Urban Road Using Time Varying Filtering Based Empirical Mode Decomposition
by Yanpeng Wang, Leina Zhao, Shuqing Li, Xinyu Wen and Yang Xiong
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(6), 2038; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/app10062038 - 17 Mar 2020
Cited by 22 | Viewed by 1956
Abstract
Short-term traffic flow prediction is important to realize real-time traffic instruction. However, due to the existing strong nonlinearity and non-stationarity in short-term traffic volume data, it is hard to obtain a satisfactory result through the traditional method. To this end, this paper develops [...] Read more.
Short-term traffic flow prediction is important to realize real-time traffic instruction. However, due to the existing strong nonlinearity and non-stationarity in short-term traffic volume data, it is hard to obtain a satisfactory result through the traditional method. To this end, this paper develops an innovative hybrid method based on the time varying filtering based empirical mode decomposition (TVF-EMD) and least square support vector machine (LSSVM). Specifically, TVF-EMD is firstly used to deal with the implied non-stationarity in the original data by decomposing them into several different subseries. Then, the LSSVM models are established for each subseries to capture the linear and nonlinear characteristics embedded in the original data, and the corresponding prediction results are superimposed to obtain the final one. Finally, case studies based on two groups of data measured from an arterial road intersection are employed to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results indicate it outperforms the other involved models. For example, compared with the LSSVM model, the average improvements by the proposed method in terms of the indexes of mean absolute error, mean relative percentage error, root mean square error and root mean square relative error are 7.397, 15.832%, 10.707 and 24.471%, respectively. Full article
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