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As Building Information Modeling evolves into becoming the central mean for coordinating project design and planning activities, we notice a few limitations/opportunities in the way current BIM tools address the needs for integrated design, collaboration and analysis (the initial objective of BIM). First, substantial communications and interactions about the design exist outside the BIM environment — typically in e-mail formats. This may cause distractions, delays to the project, and could waste valuable knowledge (contained in these interactions). Second, the need of engaging end-users and their keen interest in selecting “green” features. Professionals can develop different designs that achieve varying levels of energy conservation, but these will always require changes based on usage patterns. So, it is important that end-users are involved in the design process early on to make sure that they receive adequate information/ education before they make decisions. This is the nature of limitations that we try to address in this research. This paper builds around the design and development of an online system, named Green2.0 that tries to leverage advancements in Building Information Models (BIM), energy-efficiency simulation tools, and online social network analysis methods to enable a data-driven approach to building planning, construction and maintenance. Fundamentally, it allows participants (end-users or professionals) to comment and share views about building designs. Social network analysis and semantic modeling tools are then used to extract information from these interactions. At the same time, it connects BIM to energy analysis software to allow users to select different products from a catalog and assess the impact of each on energy consumption. The platform aims to advance the current state of the art by bringing about a fundamental shift in the way that AEC professionals, end-users and public policy makers work together throughout a building's lifecycle. Designed as an open platform, it provides access to information that enables researchers and practitioners to build new, more efficient theories and methods of building design. The premise of our work is that by providing new insights into the building design process it is likely to have a profound beneficial effect for both AEC professionals and the society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Incorporating energy efficiency and sustainable green design features into new/existing buildings has become a top priority in recent years for building owners, designers, contractors, and facility managers. This paper intends to address why delivery of an energy efficient building is not just the result of applying one or more isolated technologies. Rather, it can best be obtained using an integrated whole building process throughout the entire project development process, which leads building designers to generate a large amount of data during energy simulations. The authors observed that even a simple energy modeling run generated pages of data with many different variables. The volumes of energy modeling data clearly overwhelm traditional data analysis methods such as spreadsheets and ad-hoc queries with so many factors to be considered. An integrated or whole building design process involves studies of the energy-related impacts and interactions of all building components, including the building location, envelope (walls, windows, doors, and roof), heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system, lighting, controls, and equipment, which shows why it is so difficult to find the correlation between different systems. The objective of this research is to develop an energy efficient building design process using data mining technology which can help project teams discover important patterns to improve the building design. This paper utilizes the data mining technology to extract interrelationships and patterns of interest from a large dataset. Case study revealed that data mining based energy modeling help project teams discover useful patterns to improve the energy efficiency of building design during the design phase. The method developed during this research could be used to guide designers and engineers through the process of completing an early design energy analysis based on energy simulation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper deals with the method of how to regenerate the potential energy for a hybrid hydraulic excavator (HHE). After studying the structure and working cycle of the HHE, two energy regeneration systems are considered. Then, the control strategy and parameter matching for the proposed energy regeneration system (ERS) are discussed. United simulations with AMEsim and MATLAB/simulink for the conventional control system and two ERSs are carried out in this paper. An estimated 41% of the total potential energy could be regenerated at the lowering of the boom in accumulator-motor-generator system while the recovery efficiency in the motor-generator system is only about 17%, and it is also shown that the accumulator-motor-generator energy regeneration system (AMGERS) features better speed control of the boom and response characteristics than the motor-generator energy regeneration system (MGERS), hence, the AMGERS is a good configuration for the HHE at present. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, an energy saving drive system with variable speed hydrostatic control for cutterhead drive of shield tunneling machine is presented. The mathematical models of electric motor link and pump controlled motor link are built. Power consumption and energy losses of each link through the whole drive system are analyzed. To compare with the conventional cutterhead hydraulic drive system, simulations and experiments are carried out concerning a test rig with the hydraulic loading system performing different working conditions. Base on a group of tunneling parameters in three typical types of soil layers and the characteristics similarities between the drive systems of model machine cutterhead and variable speed pump controlled motor, the energy saving effect and system efficiency improvement of the proposed cutterhead drive system compared with the system currently undergoing services are achieved finally, providing a promising drive technique with great potential of energy saving. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The structural air compressor has heavy power consumption during the course of operation, so the energy conservation control is one of the major challenges in the research of its control mechanism. In this paper, a co-operative control mechanism based on the gray prediction is proposed to control the air supply flow of the air compressor. The air supply flow of each air compressor is sent to the main gas tank, and dozens of pneumatic rock drills are driven by the high pressure gas of a main pipeline connected to the main gas tank. According to the real-time measurement and analysis of the pressure of the main gas tank, the controller predicts the next value of the pressure and dynamically regulates the working time of each air compressor. With the control mechanism, the pressure of the main gas tank is smooth and the total working time of the air compressors is reduced. The statistical results demonstrate that the presented control mechanism can effectively reduce about 22% energy consumption of the air compressor. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]