New publications co-authored by CIMNE scientists has recently been published in different international scientific journals [check them on Google Scholar].

The article titled “A data-driven methodology for enhanced measurement and verification of energy efficiency savings in commercial buildings” is available online from July and will be published in the November's issue of the journal Applied Energy.

Benedetto Grillone is the main author of this publication co-authored by other members of the group Building Energy and Environment Group of CIMNE in cooperation with CERIEN-UPC.


Fig 1. Consumption time-series for the office building, with colours marking the implemented EEMs. From the article “A data-driven methodology for enhanced measurement and verification of energy efficiency savings in commercial buildings”

This publication addresses the methods to obtain accurate estimations of the savings generated by building energy efficiency interventions as a topic of great importance. It is considered to be one of the keys to increase capital investments in energy conservation strategies worldwide. In this study, a novel data-driven methodology is proposed for the measurement and verification of energy efficiency savings, with special focus on commercial buildings and facilities.

The publication “Exploring the mechanical response of low-carbon soil improvement mixtures” has been published in August 2021 on the Canadian Geotechnical Journal. Alessandro Fraccica is the main author of this paper, a collaboration between CIMNE, Technical University of Catalonia and the MBCC Group. Giovanni Spagnoli, Enrique E. Romero Morales, Marcos Arroyo and Rodrigo Gómez are the co-authors of this publication.

“Topology Optimization Methods for 3D Structural Problems: A Comparative Study” (Daniel Yago, Juan Carlos Cante, Oriol Lloberas-Valls and Javier Oliver) and “Multiresonant Layered Acoustic Metamaterial (MLAM) solution for broadband low-frequency noise attenuation through double-peak sound transmission loss response” (David Roca, Juan Carlos Cante, Oriol Lloberas-Valls, Teresa Pàmies and Javier Oliver) are two publications of the Computational Design & Analysis of Engineering Metamaterials group of CIMNE. The first one is a work published on Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering which provides an exhaustive comparison of some representative families of topology optimization methods for 3D structural optimization, such as the Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization (SIMP), the Level-set, the Bidirectional Evolutionary Structural Optimization (BESO), and the Variational Topology Optimization (VARTOP) methods. The second, “Multiresonant Layered Acoustic Metamaterial (MLAM) solution for broadband low-frequency noise attenuation through double-peak sound transmission loss response”, published in Extreme Mechanics Letters addresses the problem of noise control and attenuation. It is of interest in a broad range of applications, especially in the low-frequency range, below 1000 Hz. Acoustic metamaterials allow us to tackle this problem with solutions that do not necessarily rely on high amounts of mass, however most of them still present two major challenges: they rely on complex structures making them difficult to manufacture, and their attenuating capabilities are limited to narrow frequency bandwidths.

“Numerical prediction of the distribution of black carbon in a street canyon using a semi-Lagrangian finite element formulation” is a cooperation between two Severo Ochoa Centres of Excellence, CIMNE and IDAEA, published in journal Building and Environment. The autors of this publication are Albert Puigferrat, Ignasi de Pouplana, Fulvio Amato and Eugenio Oñate. It presents a procedure for coupling the fluid and transport equations to model the distribution of a pollutant in a street canyon, in this case, black carbon (BC). The fluid flow is calculated with a stabilized finite element method using the Quasi-Static Variational Multiscale (QS-VMS) technique.

The Structural Mechanics Group of CIMNE has also published a paper in the journal Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering titled “Semi-Lagrangian formulation for the advection–diffusion–absorption equation”. The authors Albert Puigferrat, Miguel Masó, Ignasi de Pouplana, Guillermo Casas, Eugenio Oñate present in this work a numerical method for solving advective–diffusive–absorptive problems with high values of advection and absorption.

Check CIMNE publications on Google Scholar