What is future of high rise buildings? What makes a building smart ?

What is future of high rise buildings? What makes a building smart ?
Four walls and a roof: those are the minimum requirements of a building. We need shelter to survive and we create buildings to meet that need. So why build more than absolutely necessary? Why not build plain, simple gray blocks for everyone? The truth is that the buildings we work and live in shape who we are; whether we know it or not. They influence how happy and productive we are. A better building enables more efficient workers, more inclusive relationships, and a healthier well-being for each occupant.

What is a smart building?

A smart building is any structure that uses automated processes to automatically control the building’s operations including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, security and other systems. A smart building uses sensors, actuators and microchips, in order to collect data and manage it according to building’s functions and services. This infrastructure helps owners, architects & engineers improve reliability and performance, which reduces energy use, optimizes space utilization and minimizes the environmental impact of buildings.

At the most fundamental level, smart buildings make occupants more productive with lighting, thermal comfort, air quality, physical security, sanitation and more at lower costs and environmental impact than buildings that are not connected.

The Benefits of Smart Buildings

Smart buildings integrate technology to provide solutions to the age old issues of overspend and inefficiency in building construction and use. With the use of sensors, such as footfall counters and thermal imaging, actionable data is gathered on how the building is being used to enable it to perform better. Following are some key benefits of smart buildings:

Predictive maintenance

Maintenance costs can be substantial when handled manually. However, without maintenance building equipment requires far more frequent replacement, which takes chunks out of budgets. Smart buildings enable simpler predictive maintenance. Sensors can detect building performance and activate maintenance procedures before an alert is triggered.

Reducing energy consumption

Figures vary depending on systems and buildings, but you could reduce the energy consumption in a building by around 5% -35% with the use of smart technology. This translates into significant financial savings, as well as a much more efficient and effective approach to meeting green goals.

Productivity and comfort of occupants

Smart buildings have been specifically designed to deliver a more comfortable experience for their occupants. They can raise standards and ensure that health and safety considerations are being met, as well as ensure that this is implemented in a cost efficient way. Smart buildings make people more productive by continually monitoring building use and adjusting systems to ensure that occupants have the facilities that they need.

More efficient planning and use of resources

The data generated by a smart building provides key insight that can be fed into planning and use of resources. So, there is no longer a need to rely on guesswork when it comes to resource management as this can be informed by real-time, genuine intelligence.

Data visibility and insights

Smart buildings can do things like output data on structural integrity, merge data from disparate systems into a common platform for analytics and reporting, and offer a visual snapshot of which facilities are experiencing things like high energy usage, unusual maintenance costs, and more. This visibility into your building’s data offers actionable information that can provide cost-saving solutions and innovations.

How Can I make my building smart ?

There are many different methodologies of implementing smart building technologies:

• Water Supply Systems can be automated to detect leaks, monitor quality, and automate heating and cooling.
• Chiller plants can be optimized to incorporate outside weather data to reduce energy use while cooling the building.
• Air conditioning and heating systems can be set up to turn on and off based on the occupancy of a room.
• A building’s electrical loads can be categorized and grouped by priority to better understand how critical and non-essential loads are working.
• Connected weather stations can be added to the outside of buildings to optimize internal systems like temperature and air quality.
• Sensors can be used to check for room occupancy and match patterns to energy use throughout the day.
• Infrastructure can be added to the cloud for storage and data management.
• Multiple internal systems like lighting, air conditioning, water, and ventilation can be connected to see how they affect each other throughout the day and optimize for efficiency.
• Structural integrity can be monitored by tracking how the building responds to ambient vibrations.
• Data collection can be used to maintain optimal comfort settings for residents in the building while also reducing waste.
• Remote control over systems can shorten the response times for building managers and allow them to address issues in the building from a distance.

Examples of Smart Buildings from Around the World

As you can imagine, more and more businesses are adding smart building technologies to their properties in many different ways. Below are some of our favorite examples of smart buildings throughout the world.

The Mirage, Las Vegas

The Mirage in Las Vegas uses smart building technology to lower their energy costs through load-shedding. They have weather stations that monitor wind, temperature, humidity and more which can do things like chill water in advance of demand on extremely hot days, reducing operation during peak times.

UNIQA Tower, Vienna

UNIQA Tower is equipped with a heating and cooling system that is automated and based on the temperature of the outside environment. This has reduced their annual CO2 emissions by 84 tons and has made the operation of the building more cost-effective.

MIT Green Building, Cambridge

MIT is on the cutting edge of developing and testing new smart building technologies. In 2010, they added sensors to the campus’ Green Building to allow it to sense its own internal damage over time.

Deloitte’s The Edge, Amsterdam

In 2015, Bloomberg called The Edge ‘The Smartest Building in the World’. One reason attributed to it is the highest level of sustainability and eco-friendliness as it has homes for bats and beehives towers in the exterior area of the building. It is also incorporated with an intelligent light system by Philips. One of the most amazing features of The Edge is the security robot that travels through the entire building as everyone calls it a day. It’s also optimized for the prime conditions of the humans who work there every day. The building even has a smartphone app that knows each worker’s preferences for light and temperature and adjusts the rooms to those settings as they move throughout the building.

Given the transition from orthodox to smart in all spheres of life : cell phones, televisions, cars and many more. Smart buildings will be the next big thing in construction industry. Exciting times ahead !