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Buildings have a considerable environmental impact that corresponds to almost 30% of the global carbon footprint, with a prediction for further growth, and to 40% of the final energy consumption in the EU. The EU therefore has set a goal to reduce primary energy use by 20% by 2020, which is one of the five headline targets of the European 2020 Strategy. Moreover, the European Commission has established since 2002 a common policy for sustainable buildings and low environmental impact materials promoting energy efficiency and reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs), based on a series of directives and regulations. A key role parameter for sustainable building construction is the appropriate building envelope's thermal insulation in order to reduce its thermal losses. This was firstly introduced in Greece with the Regulation of Building Insulation in 1979. Therefore, the paper focuses on the implementation of thermal insulation at buildings in compliance with the Greek national legislation framework during the last forty years. In this line of approach, measurements of the U-values and of the internal and external surface temperatures were carried out, in residential and office buildings. The sample consisted of buildings with construction dates that mirrored the development in legislation and in the building practice.

Summarization: The significance of bioclimatic architecture has become widely accepted since the 1970s and the implementation of its principles in practice is a key factor in order to achieve energy efficiency in the building sector. The way, however, from scientific acceptance to commercial utilization is not a straightforward one. This paper deals with the notion of bioclimatic architecture in buildings and investigates the aspects of this concept in Hellas. A sample of university researchers, building contractors and members of public organisations was interviewed using a standardised set of guidelines. The barriers to promoting bioclimatic design, role of the local government in the adoption process, level of environmental culture as well as perspectives of this concept in Hellas were the key areas of discussion in each of the interviews. The results from the data analysis reveal insufficient economic incentives, a lack in technical information as well as a lack in specific environmental policies that would foster the propagation of bioclimatic architecture. ; Presented on: Energy Policy

AbstractAccounting for SARS-CoV-2 adsorption on solids suspended in wastewater is a necessary step towards the reliable estimation of virus shedding rate in a sewerage system, based on measurements performed at a terminal collection station, i.e., at the entrance of a wastewater treatment plant. This concept is extended herein to include several measurement stations across a city to enable the estimation of spatial distribution of virus shedding rate. This study presents a pioneer general model describing the most relevant physicochemical phenomena with a special effort to reduce the complicated algebra. This is performed both in the topology regime, introducing a discrete-continuous approach, and in the domain of independent variables, introducing a monodisperse moment method to reduce the dimensionality of the resulting population balance equations. The resulting simplified model consists of a large system of ordinary differential equations. A sensitivity analysis is performed with respect to some key parameters for a single pipe topology. Specific numerical techniques are employed for the integration of the model. Finally, a parametric case study for an indicative—yet realistic—sewerage piping system is performed to show how the model is applied to SARS-CoV-2 adsorption on wastewater solids in the presence of other competing species. This is the first model of this kind appearing in scientific literature and a first step towards setting up an inverse problem to assess the spatial distribution of virus shedding rate based on its concentration in wastewater.