Fundamentals of Green Building
Undergraduate course, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2022
This course provides the fundamentals of green building, including the indoor environment quality, energy saving strategies and design.
Background
Urbanization process has significantly modified the environment we live in during the past decades. People spend more than 90% of lifetime in buildings and cities. The quality of built environment is critical to comfort, productivity, and health of city residents. Meanwhile, buildings consume 30%-40% of total energy consumption in cities. Reducing building energy consumption is crucial for the sustainable development of human beings. The goal of green building is to create comfort built environment with less energy consumption.
Contents
On the building scale, this course will cover the two pillars of green building: the environment quality and energy consumption. First, it will discuss the four aspects of indoor environment quality: thermal environment, indoor air quality, lighting environment and acoustic environment. Then, it will introduce building energy consumption, energy efficient design (sometimes referred to as passive design), and the opportunities as well as the challenges to integrate renewables into green building. Last, it will introduce the mainstream green building standards in the world.
On the city scale, the course will cover the basic principles of surface energy balance under the influence of anthropogenic activities. Students are expected to learn fundamental knowledge on how thermal properties affect the temperature behaviour of engineering materials, and how building design interacts with the outdoor environment. Lectures will cover the underlying mechanisms that can lead to green buildings in an interactive built environment.
The fundamental knowledge about green building can help students better understand built environment, energy efficient building design, micro-climate of cities, and the interaction between buildings and micro-climate. Students plan to work in the building industry as civil engineer, urban planner, building services engineering will benefit from learning the fundamental knowledge of green building.