CESBP 2025 Budapest Hungary

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Prof. Umberto Berardi

Short Bio: Dr. Berardi is the current President of the International Association of Building Physics (IABP) and Director of the BeTOP laboratory. Dr. Berardi has been Canada Research Chair in Building Science (from 2021 to August 2024) and Full Professor and Director of the BeTOP center at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada (from 2014 to August 2024). His main research interests are related to the study of innovative solutions and new materials for improving the resilience and the energy performance of the built environment. Dr. Berardi has an extensive publication record, including 200 peer-reviewed journals, 200 international conference papers, and twelve books. Dr. Berardi has a body of funded research comprising over $3M in government and private sector sponsored research, including Canada Foundation Initiative JELF, NSERC Discovery Grant; Early Research Award from the MRI - Ontario. His awards include (among others): Frontiers in 2024, the 2023 European Thermophysical Properties ECTP-NETZSCH AWARD; the 10th Canada's Clean16 award and Clean50 award for R&D in 2021.He is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Building Engineering, and member of the editorial board of many journals, including Energy and Buildings, Sustainable Cities and Society, and Building and Environment.

Climate Change Impacts and Mitigations for the Built Environment

It is more and more known that buildings must be designed for future climate conditions. Wetter winters and sudden heavy downpours make it even more important to direct rainwater and meltwater away frombuildings, whose internal temperatures fluctuations need to be controlled using innovative passive approaches. In fact, the energy transition is a pathway to transform the global energy sector from a fossil-based to a zero-carbon system, requiring building phsycis to provide solutions for zero energy buildings. These require an integrative and holistic approach to all aspects affecting energy performance, comfort and health. This keynote provides a platform for recent research in exploring the impacts of climate changes on buildings and presents several nano-technologies developed to make buildings more resilient.

Prof. Mark Bomberg

Short Bio: Mark Bomberg, Technology D. (Lund U., Sweden 1974), and D. Science in Engineering (Warsaw Tech, U, Poland, 1965), is a Research Prof. at Mechanical Eng., Clarkson U, Potsdam NY, and RD Manager of IBS (Inovative Building Systems), Radom, Poland, Life Member of Building Enclosure Technology and Environment (BETEC) Committee of the National Institute of Building Science (NIBS) in Washington, DC. He worked at National Research Council of Canada (1975-2000) and was an Editor-in-Chief of J. Building Physics (1984-2018). He lives in Poland but works in the US and Europe. He was teaching in, the US, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Poland and China. He is a Guest Editor in a few Journals: Buildings and Energies (MPDI, Switzerland), Frontiers in Science and others. He received the highest awards in building physics in the US and Canada. His research background includes heat, air and moisture, material science and durability of construction materials. He wrote more than 300 reviewed papers and 7 books, has 93,000 reads and 1,600 citations on the Research Gate.

Building physics paradigm should be focused on solving challenges of our time

I have taught and observed enclosure and building physics courses at several universities. Excellent, were usually taught by specialists with broad backgrounds, fragmented and mediocre, were taught by instructors with a narrow background. It is not surprise; whatever name is used for this domain of engineering it is a multi-disciplinary field. Building physics started from observed non-structural failures. In the 1970s, some real-time risk assessment became possible with heat and mass transfer modeling. Yet the fragmented nature of analysis at this time, prevented holistic understanding of building performance. One generation later, the field of building physics became holistic and complex. Simplistic introduction to physics was replaced by focus on different factors affecting indoor environments and their multi-disciplinary interactions, occupants' comfort or durability of materials, use of combined monitoring and modeling, and limitations of artificial intelligence. It is necessary because the next generation of building physics will deal with people more than technology. Today, despite progress in technology and fact that passive house approach combined with the discussed elsewhere energy supply method, may save 70 to 80% of building energy, we cannot change the role of buildings in a climate change. The Canadian demonstration of a passive house in 1978 failed because the gap between building science and construction practice was, and still is, too large. Canada, the USA, and Japan responded by instituting public-private, high-impact national programs, which changed the focus of design from improving building materials to designing the whole building and selecting materials for specific contribution to the assembly. It is of paramount significance that building science (physics) courses continue this trend addressing the future indoor environment and energy solutions considering integration of heating-cooling and ventilation technologies, integration with smart technologies and designing buildings as a part of building clusters.

Prof. Ardeshir Mahdavi

Short Bio: University Professor Ardeshir Mahdavi is an internationally recognized expert in Building Science. Professor Mahdavi has held senior positions at multiple academic institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA), Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien, Austria), Graz Univesity of Technology (TU Graz, Austria), National University of Singapore (NUS, Singapore), and Vienna Univesity of Economics and Business (WU Wien, Austria). Professor Mahdavi conducts research in building physics, building performance simulation, design computing, building ecology, and human ecology. Professor Mahdavi has published over 700 scientific papers and has supervised over 65 doctoral students. Professor Mahdavi is the recipient of the prestigious IBPSA (International Building Performance Simulation Association) Distinguished Achievements Awards.

Tools, processes, values: Critical reflections on the Building Performance Concept

Generally speaking, the performance paradigm concerns quality assessment of entities and processes. As applied to buildings, the performance paradigm encompasses the definition of criteria and variables relevant to the specification, prediction, measurement, and validation of buildings' quality. The performance-based approach to the building delivery process, given its outcome-centric nature, arguably offers certain advantages, including flexibility in design decision-making. However, viewed from a broader sustainability perspective, the current practices regarding the implementation of the building performance paradigm display certain limitations. These pertain primarily to issues of scale (e.g., individual building units versus whole urban neighborhoods), agency (e.g., individual stakeholders versus communal entities, public institutions, commercial conglomerates, as well as national and international organizations), and impact (e.g., local optimization of narrowly conceived factors versus high-level spatio-temporal performance targets). This keynote presentation explores these limitations and their multifaceted implications for the sustainability discourse. Moreover, the potential and prospects of a distinctly integrative stance toward the performance paradigm are discussed.

Prof. Hamed H. Saber

Short Bio: Prof. Hamed Saber is currently working as a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Jubail Industrial College, and the Chair of Research and Consultation at the Deanship of Research and Industrial Development, Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu, Saudi Arabia. Also, he has work experience at the Institute for Space and Nuclear Studies and the Chemical and Nuclear Department at University of New Mexico (USA), and the National Research Council of Canada. Over the course of his career, he has received several awards and published over 280 publications. Most recently, he was the recipient of the prestigious "International Alexander Schwartz Award". As well, he is listed in the top 2% of the scholars based on the study by Stanford University. His areas of interest include building science, building envelope and structure, Heat, Air and Moisture (HAM) transport in building envelopes, CFD, static energy conversion using thermoelectrics, electronic cooling, numerical modeling using finite element methods, fire safety and fire performance in houses.

Advanced Numerical Model and Tools for Evaluating Energy Performance of Reflective Insulations

Reflective insulations (RIs) are currently being used in building envelope components (walls, roofs, windows, curtain walls and skylight dives). RIs use single- and multi-airspaces with at least one surface having low emittance. As the three modes of heat transfer (conduction, convection and radiation) occur in the airspace, its thermal performance depends on airspace dimensions and orientations, and temperatures and emittances of all surfaces bounding the airspace as well as heat flow direction through the airspace. The evaluations of airspace thermal performance are presently based on data from the U.S. National Bureau of Standards and represented in the ASHRAE Handbook-Fundamentals and ISO-6946. These evaluations, however, are limited to a few airspace configurations and do not account for all of the parameters that impact thermal performance. In several studies, advanced and extensively validated 2D- and 3D-numerical models were used to assess the energy and moisture performance of building envelope components. This model simultaneously solves the Heat, Air and Moisture (HAM) equations for various building applications. For building components with reflective insulations and radiant barriers, the model was used to:
(a) Develop an innovative user-friendly evaluation and design tool called "Airspace Reflective Tool - ART" developed to evaluate enclosed airspaces for different building applications. ART addresses limitations in the currently available methods.
(b) Assess the energy performance of reflective insulations with air intrusion due to infiltration and wind washing for various air-changes per hour for walls, flat-roofs and sloped-roofs, with different heat- flow directions.
(c) Assess the energy performance of reflective insulations having multiple airspaces with quantitative evaluation of the effect of defects and cross airflow between the airspaces.
(d) Assess the energy performance of residential attics containing radiant barriers and various heat-flow directions.
The results obtained for case studies of the above items will be discussed.