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This study aims to create an efficient approach to validate building energy simulation models amidst challenges from time-intensive data collection. Emphasizing precision in model calibration through strategic short-term data acquisition, the systematic framework targets critical adjustments using a strategically captured dataset. Leveraging metrics like Mean Bias Error (MBE) and Coefficient of Variation of Root Mean Square Error (CV(RMSE)), this methodology aims to heighten energy efficiency assessment accuracy without lengthy data collection periods.

A standalone school and a campus facility were selected as case studies. Field investigations enabled precise energy modeling, emphasizing user-dependent parameters and compliance with standards. Simulation outputs were compared to short-term actual measurements, utilizing MBE and CV(RMSE) metrics, focusing on internal temperature and CO₂ levels. Energy bills and consumption data were scrutinized to verify natural gas and electricity usage against uncertain parameters.

Discrepancies between initial simulations and measurements were observed. Following adjustments, the standalone school 1’s average internal temperature increased from 19.5 °C to 21.3 °C, with MBE and CV(RMSE) aiding validation. Campus facilities exhibited complex variations, addressed by accounting for CO₂ levels and occupancy patterns, with similar metrics aiding validation. Revisions in lighting and electrical equipment schedules improved electricity consumption predictions. Verification of natural gas usage and monthly error rate calculations refined the simulation model.

This paper tackles Building Energy Simulation validation challenges due to data scarcity and time constraints. It proposes a strategic, short-term data collection method. It uses MBE and CV(RMSE) metrics for a comprehensive evaluation to ensure reliable energy efficiency predictions without extensive data collection.

Energy-efficiency measures have always been important when renovating aging building stock. For property owners, window intervention is a recurring issue. Replacement is common to reduce operational heating energy (OHE) use, something many previous building renovation studies have considered. Maintaining rather than replacing windows has received less attention, especially for multi-residential buildings in a subarctic climate where there is great potential for OHE savings. The objective was to assess the life cycle (LC) climate impact and costs of three window maintenance and replacement options for a 1980s multi-residential building in subarctic Sweden.

The options’ embodied and operational impacts from material production, transportation and space heating were assessed using a life cycle assessment (LCA) focusing on global warming potential (LCA-GWP) and life cycle costing (LCC) with a 60-year reference study period. A sensitivity analysis was used to explore the impact of uncertain parameters on LCA-GWP and LCC outcomes.

Maintaining instead of replacing windows minimized LC climate impact and costs, except under a few specific conditions. The reduced OHE use from window replacement had a larger compensating effect on embodied global warming potential (E-GWP) than investment costs, i.e. replacement was primarily motivated from a LC climate perspective. The LCA-GWP results were more sensitive to changes in some uncertain parameters, while the LCC results were more robust.

The findings highlight the benefits of maintenance over replacement to reduce costs and decarbonize window interventions, challenging property owners’ preference to replace windows and emphasizing the significance of including maintenance activities in future renovation research.

With more cities aiming to achieve climate neutrality, identifying the funding to support these plans is essential. The purpose of this paper is to exploit the present of a structured green bonds framework in Sweden to investigate the typology of abatement projects Swedish municipalities invested in and understand their effectiveness.

Marginal abatement cost curves of the green bond measures are constructed by using the financial and abatement data provided by municipalities on an annual basis.

The results highlight the economic competitiveness of clean energy production, measured in abatement potential per unit of currency, even when compared to other emerging technologies that have attracted the interest of policymakers. A comparison with previous studies on the cost efficiency of carbon capture storage reveals that clean energy projects, especially wind energy production, can contribute to the reduction of emissions in a more efficient way. The Swedish carbon tax is a good incentive tool for investments in clean energy projects.

The improvement concerning previous applications is twofold: the authors expand the financial considerations to include the whole life-cycle costs, and the authors consider all the greenhouse gases. This research constitutes a prime in using financial and environmental data produced by local governments to assess the effectiveness of their environmental measures.

Heating, ventilating, air-conditioning and cooling (HVAC) systems are crucial in daily health-care facility services. Design-related defects can lead to maintenance issues, causing service disruptions and cost overruns. These defects can be avoided if a link between the early design stages and maintenance feedback is established. This study aims to use experts’ experience in HVAC maintenance in health-care facilities to list and evaluate the risk of each maintenance issue caused by a design defect, supported by the literature.

Following semistructured interviews with experts, 41 maintenance issues were identified as the most encountered issues. Subsequently, a survey was conducted in which 44 participants evaluated the probability and impact of each design-caused issue.

Chillers were identified as the HVAC components most prone to design defects and cost impact. However, air distribution ducts and air handling units are the most critical HVAC components for maintaining healthy conditions inside health-care facilities.

The unavailability of comprehensive data on the cost impacts of all design-related defects from multiple health-care facilities limits the ability of HVAC designers to furnish case studies and quantitative approaches.

This study helps HVAC designers acquire prior knowledge of decisions that may have led to unnecessary and avoidable maintenance. These design-related maintenance issues may cause unfavorable health and cost consequences.

The purpose of this study is to examine crisis effects on customer satisfaction and underlying drivers by adding a new set of data to previous research. The core questions are: are the findings from Hallencreutz and Parmler (2019, 2021) sustained or can new customer demands, needs, expectations and behaviours be traced in the wake of the ongoing crisis?

A first study covering 2005–2017 was completed in 2018, published online in 2019 and in print in 2021 (Hallencreutz and Parmler, 2021). This new study adds the years 2018–2023 to the data set and reuses the partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation models, also known as PLS path modelling.

This additional study sustains the results from the initial study (Hallencreutz and Parmler, 2019, 2021). The variable product quality has been substituted by service quality as one of the most crucial drivers for customer satisfaction together with brand image, and the current state of permacrisis has not changed that.

The study is built on Swedish data from the EPSI Rating Initiative (Eklöf and Westlund 2002) covering customer perceptions in banking, insurance (life and non-life), telco (mobile operators, broadband and Pay-tv) and energy (trade, distribution and heating) over the years 2005–2023.

The study emphasizes the importance of understanding how customer satisfaction drivers evolve over time in different industries and societal sectors, especially during crises. This additional study sustains the paradigm shift in the studied industries – product quality has been substituted by service quality as one of the most crucial drivers for customer satisfaction, and the current state of economic downturn has not changed that.

Society will have to learn to live with political and economic instability and unpredictability for the foreseeable future. To recognize the increasing value deriving from firms’ intangible assets while providing flawless deliveries seems to be a way forward in troublesome times. This is also a catalyst for existing societal trends: the necessary reforms to master sustainable transformations will require an ongoing adaptation process, with both winners and losers across continents.

The world has coped with a global pandemic, and Europe is currently experiencing a humanitarian, political and economic crises caused by a war in Ukraine. This extended period of global instability and insecurity could be called a permacrisis (Collins dictionary, 2022). This study offers a unique quantitative analysis built on Swedish data from EPSI Rating initiative.

Polymer laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB/P) is an additive manufacturing technology that is sustainable due to the possibility of recycling the powder multiple times and allowing the fabrication of gears without the aid of support structures and subsequent assembly. However, there are constraints in the process that negatively affect its adoption compared to other additive technologies such as material extrusion to produce gears. This study aims to demonstrate that it is possible to overcome the problems due to the physics of the process to produce accurate mechanism.

Technological aspects such as orientation, wheel-shaft thicknesses and degree of powder recycling were examined. Furthermore, the evolving tooth profile was considered as a design parameter to provide a manufacturability map of gear-based mechanisms.

Results show that there are some differences in the functioning of the gear depending on the type of powder used, 100% virgin or 50% virgin and 50% recycled for five cycles. The application of a groove on a gear produced with 100% virgin powder allows the mechanism to be easily unlocked regardless of the orientation and wheel-shaft thicknesses. The application of a specific evolutionary profile independent of the diameter of the reference circle on vertically oriented gears guarantees rotation continuity while preserving the functionality of the assembled mechanism.

In the literature, there are various studies on material aging and reuse in the PBF-LB/P process, mainly focused on the powder deterioration mechanism, powder fluidity, microstructure and mechanical properties of the parts and process parameters. This study, instead, was focused on the functioning of gears, which represent one of the applications in which this technology can have great success, by analyzing the two main effects that can compromise it: recycled powder and vertical orientation during construction.

This paper presents a new and well-structured framework that aims to assess the current environmental impact from a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions perspective. This tool includes a new set of Lean Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which translates the well-known logic of Overall Equipment Effectiveness in the field of GHG emissions, that can progressively detect industrial losses that cause GHG emissions and support decision-making for implementing improvements.

The new metrics are presented with reference to two different perspectives: (1) to highlight the deviation of the current value of emissions from the target; (2) to adopt a diagnostic orientation not only to provide an assessment of current performance but also to search for the main causes of inefficiencies and to direct improvement implementations.

The proposed framework was applied to a major company operating in the plywood production sector. It identified emission-related losses at each stage of the production process, providing an overall performance evaluation of 53.1%. The industrial application shows how the indicators work in practice, and the framework as a whole, to assess GHG emissions related to industrial losses and to proper address improvement actions.

This paper scrutinizes a new set of Lean KPIs to assess the industrial losses causing GHG emissions and identifies some significant drawbacks. Then it proposes a new structure of losses and KPIs that not only quantify efficiency but also allow to identify viable countermeasures.

Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) models often perform poorly in shock/turbulence interaction regions, resulting in excessive wall heat load and incorrect representation of the separation length in shockwave/turbulent boundary layer interactions. The authors suggest that this can be traced back to inadequate numerical treatment of the inviscid fluxes. The purpose of this study is an extension to the well-known Harten, Lax, van Leer, Einfeldt (HLLE) Riemann solver to overcome this issue.

It explicitly takes into account the broadening of waves due to the averaging procedure, which adds numerical dissipation and reduces excessive turbulence production across shocks. The scheme is derived based on the HLLE equations, and it is tested against three numerical experiments.

Sod’s shock tube case shows that the scheme succeeds in reducing turbulence amplification across shocks. A shock-free turbulent flat plate boundary layer indicates that smooth flow at moderate turbulence intensity is largely unaffected by the scheme. A shock/turbulent boundary layer interaction case with higher turbulence intensity shows that the added numerical dissipation can, however, impair the wall heat flux distribution.

The proposed scheme is motivated by implicit large eddy simulations that use numerical dissipation as subgrid-scale model. Introducing physical aspects of turbulence into the numerical treatment for RANS simulations is a novel approach.

There is a renowned interest in adaptability as an important principle for achieving circularity in the built environment. Circular building adaptability (CBA) could enable long-term building utilisation and flexible use of space with limited material flows. This paper identifies and analyses design strategies facilitating CBA to propose a framework for enhancing the implementation of the concept.

Interviews were conducted with professionals experienced in circular building design to explore the questions “How do currently applied design strategies enable CBA?” and “How can CBA be implemented through a conceptual design framework?”. The interviews encircled multi-residential building examples to identify currently applied circular design strategies. The interviews were analysed through qualitative content analysis using CBA determinants as a coding framework.

The results show that all ten CBA determinants are supported by design strategies applied in current circular building design. However, some determinants are more supported than others, and design strategies are often employed without explicitly considering adaptability. The design strategies that enable adaptability offer long-term solutions requiring large-scale modifications rather than facilitating low-impact adaptation by dwelling occupants. The proposed conceptual design framework could aid architects in resolving these issues and implementing CBA in their circular building design.

This paper’s contribution to CBA is threefold. It demonstrates design strategies facilitating CBA, proposes a conceptual design framework to apply the concept and identifies the need for a more comprehensive application of available adaptability strategies.

In this study, the impact of access to electricity on poverty reduction for Botswana is examined using the annual data from 1990 to 2021. The study was motivated by the need to establish if access to electricity could be a panacea on poverty reduction in Botswana. Given that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals deadline is fast approaching, and Botswana being one of the signatories, is expected to end poverty in all its forms – Goal 1. Establishing the role that electrification plays in poverty alleviation, helps in refocusing Botswana’s poverty alleviation strategies on factors that have high impact on poverty. The main objective of this study, therefore, is to investigate the relationship between poverty alleviation and access to electricity in Botswana.

The study uses the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to investigate the nature of the relations. Two poverty proxies were used in this study namely, household consumption expenditure and life expectancy.

The study found access to electricity to reduce poverty in the long run and in the short run, regardless of the poverty measure used. Thus, access to electricity plays an important role in poverty alleviation and Botswana is recommended to continue with the rural and urban electrification initiatives.

The study explores the impact of access to electricity on poverty reduction in Botswana, a departure from the current studies that examined the same relationship using energy consumption in general. This is on the back of increasing dependence of economic activities on electricity as a major source of energy.