Sustainable Building Design

This includes working on sustainable solutions across all sectors of the built environment and considering different strategies from sustainable building design and analysis of building environment quality to sustainability rating tools and occupant health and wellbeing, in the early-stage design of a project.

Thermal comfort is the feeling of satisfaction with the thermal environment and is assessed by subjective evaluation and standards and can be assessed in different type of environments including naturally ventilated spaces and mechanically ventilated spaces.

The most commonly used indicator of thermal comfort is air temperature – it is easy to use and most people can relate to it. However, air temperature alone is not a valid or accurate indicator of thermal comfort or thermal stress. It should always be considered in relation to other environmental and personal factors.

The six factors affecting thermal comfort are both environmental and personal. These factors may be independent of each other, but together contribute to an occupant’s thermal comfort:

• Environmental Factors: Air Temperature, Radiant Temperature, Air Velocity and Humidity.
• Personal Factors: Clothing Insulation and Metabolic Heat.

Natural Daylight Modelling study includes but not limited to daylight factor assessment, daylight autonomy and glare study.

Daylight Factor (DF) is the ratio of the illuminance at a point on a plane in a room due to the light received from a sky of assumed or known luminance distribution, to that on a horizontal plane due to an unobstructed hemisphere of this sky.

Daylight Autonomy is the annual sufficiency of daylight levels in a space. DA examines the percentage of an analysis area that meets a minimum illuminance level for a specified fraction of the operating hours per year hours of the year.

Daylight GLARE PROBABILITY (DGP) is a robust glare metric whereby glare sources are detected by contrast ratios with direct daylight considered, as are specular reflections.

Climate change adaptation helps individuals, communities, organisations and natural systems to deal with those consequences of climate change that cannot be avoided.

It involves taking practical actions to manage risks from climate impacts, protect communities and strengthen the resilience of the economy. Adaptation can involve gradual transformation with many small steps over time, or major transformation with rapid change.

Passive design takes advantage of the climate to maintain a comfortable temperature range in the home. Passive design reduces or eliminates the need for auxiliary heating or cooling, which accounts for about 40% (or much more in some climates) of energy use in the average Australian home based on different factors including:

• Climate
• Orientation
• Shading
• Passive Solar Heating
• Passive Cooling
• Sealing
• Insulation
• Thermal Mass
• Glazing
• Skylight

CFD is the process of mathematically modelling a physical phenomenon involving fluid flow and solving it numerically using the computational prowess.
It can predict:

• Internal air flow temperature, direction and velocity.
• External air flow direction, and velocity.
• External static pressure.

Results are accessed via graphical views of 2D slices at any grid line.
The range, scale and colour of contours and vectors can be adjusted to improve results interpretation.

Develop strategies for portfolio-scale performance improvements, ranked by impact, cost, feasibility and long-term vs short-term strategies.

• Calculate carbon footprint including Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
• Address and mitigate risks associated with energy security and carbon emissions, from both environmental and cost standpoints.
• Create sustainability reports for internal, public, regulatory or funding purposes.
• Improve organisation-wide sustainability and provide periodic re-assessments.
• Develop and implement building and site-level strategies for reducing carbon.
• Benchmark carbon performance.

The assessment of sustainable technologies against whole-life cycle, financial and environmental benchmarks.

The assessment of REGS against whole-life cycle, financial and environmental benchmarks.