Assessment of environmental sustainability with entropy-based indicators for integrated buildings

Abstract

Different climatic conditions directly affect fuel consumption of traditional heating systems in buildings and, together with this system-induced entropy generation, constitute one of the main sources of CO2 emissions with a global impact. Although these consumptions vary primarily according to combustion performance, they generally define a high rate of exergy destruction due to irreversibility depending on the system operation and load values. In this study, first, exergy analyses were performed in order to evaluate the entropy performance and analyse it comparatively with the process efficiency. Accordingly, the fuel-based exergy efficiency of the building was found to be 55.02%, and the efficiency potential for total improvement was determined as 20.31% depending on the parametric values and the entropy criteria developed. At the end of the study, the features of the two criteria developed in such building preferences were evaluated and some recommendations were presented.