Editorial

The building sector consumes a staggering 40% of the world’s energy and is a significant generator of greenhouse gas as it heats, cools, and ventilates the indoor environment. This makes it a critical target for reducing energy consumption as we face sustainability challenges regarding energy use and environmental damage. High-performance buildings have been in high demand for a long time, as they satisfy thermal comfort and indoor air quality with minimal energy use. Advanced Engineering Designs in buildings can achieve even more significant energy reductions and provide the right thermal comfort for occupants. However, this can only be achieved if there is a collaboration among building engineers, environmental scientists, architects, facility managers, and policy makers. This was the founding spirit of COBEE (International Conference On Energy & Environment).

In 2018, the COBEE event was hosted at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. The conference brought together researchers from all over the world to showcase many advanced engineering designs and to address the negative impact of increased building energy consumption. The quality of submitted papers was exceptional and demonstrated a strong interest in the following fields: Advanced Modelling & CFD, Heat Exchange Systems, Indoor Air Quality & Health, Building Energy, Urban Buildings & Environment, Ventilation, Thermal Comfort. Other topics of interest included Building Envelope & Phase Change Materials, Passive Building Design, Sensors, Controls & Monitoring, Cooling & Air Conditioning, Experimental Measurements, Acoustic & Noise.

With this in mind, we decided on a Special Topic Issue of ‘Advanced Engineering Design in Buildings’ to continue to advance the novel and innovative solutions to address the massive energy consumed by the built environment.

Highlights of the selected papers include the consideration of HVAC use in buildings which are a source of high energy consumption. In buildings with HVAC, optimization techniques for set-point regulation (Miyata et al., 2019), and multi-stage optimization of local environmental quality accounting for a simulated person as a sensor for HVAC control (Yoo & Ito, 2019) were demonstrated to improve energy efficiency. In historical buildings that inherently exhibit vastly different building principles to modern-day design, the influence of modernized HVAC systems was considered for thermal comfort (Bakhtiari et al., 2019), which is critical for office building occupations.

However, in contrast to HVAC systems, passive systems can be used. For example, vernacular strategies and devices in an arid zone habitat in the Biskra Province of Algeria (Berghout & Forgues, 2019) and its effect on ambient comfort were demonstrated. Solar thermal storage tanks can also be used as a component of passive cooling, and a technique to optimize thermal energy storage technology at low temperatures was shown (Roccamena et al., 2019).

Undoubtedly, our demands in building thermal comfort are dependent on the climate the building is situated. This was exemplified where the effect of seasonal adaptation on outdoor thermal comfort in a hot-summer and cold-winter city (Zhou et al., 2019) was shown. And perhaps, the use of more energy-efficient wall designs through innovative use of nanomaterials on hemp/lime composites (O’Flaherty et al., 2019) can support the ongoing seasonal adaptation.

It is also of interest to the ongoing solar energy research which is a critical component towards the shift from the reliance of fossil fuels to renewable energy. The technique to estimate solar irradiation using sky view factor, sunshine factor, and solar irradiation model (Lee & Levermore, 2019) is quite novel which may lead to it being adopted to quantify the solar energy.

The selected papers represent the diversity of themes presented at the conference and highlighted the need for greater collaboration which will deliver high-level outcomes through multi-disciplinary approach. It was with great pleasure to have hosted the 4th COBEE conference held during February 5-9th in the most liveable city in the world, Melbourne, Australia – with RMIT University as the host. We thank all delegates for their strong contributions towards a fruitful conference, the submitting authors to this special issue, and the reviewers for their time and valuable comments to improve the paper submissions.