Special Journal Issue on Electrification of the Building Heating Sector

The ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities is currently accepting manuscripts for a special issue focusing on the topic “Electrification of the Building Heating Sector.” Authors interested in having their manuscripts included in the special issue, to be published in July/August 2021, should submit their manuscripts by March 1, 2021.
 
Buildings consume more than 40 percent of all the energy in developed countries, and more than 70 percent in major urban centers such as New York City, Beijing, Paris, and London. A large portion of this energy is due to space and domestic hot water (DHW) heating, which is common in high latitude cities. As countries and cities aspire to low carbon living portfolios, meeting heating demand sustainably has become a challenge and an opportunity as most heating infrastructure is fossil-fuels based. As such, electrification of the building heating sector, together with effective thermal insulation of the building envelopes, is an emerging technological field where electrical energy may be provided by low carbon sources such as solar or wind.
 
Intrinsic challenges for transitioning from carbon-based heating to electrically based heating include efficient electrically based systems such as air or ground based heat pumps, use of low global warming refrigerants, cost effective technologies, retrofit processes, power system integration, building integrated approaches, environmental and energy infrastructure impacts, and public policies and economic incentives for large scale transitions.
 
This special issue aims at raising awareness on the emerging topic of electrification of the building heating sector. It will focus on interdisciplinary research in this field and provide a venue for research findings from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
 
Manuscripts to be included in the special issue should concentrate on a range of topics including space and DHW heating loads modeling and analyses at the single building and community scales; advances in electrically based building heating technologies; advances in efficient building envelopes in cold climate; power system integration and energy management of building heating equipment; ground and air-based heat pump systems; case studies for electrically based heating technologies; electric district heating technologies and experiences; environmental and energy impacts of electrification transition processes; public policy implications in transitions to electrification of the heating sector; and refrigerants with low global warming potential.
 
Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to the journal by March 1, 2021, via Journals Connect at journaltool.asme.org. Authors who have an account should log in and select “Submit Paper” at the bottom of the page. Authors without an account should select “Submissions” and follow the steps.  At the Paper Submittal page, authors should select “ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities” and then select the special issue “Electrification of the Building Heating Sector.” Papers received after the deadline or papers not selected for inclusion in the special issue may be accepted for publication in a regular issue.
 
The editors for the special issue are K. Max Zhang, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Cornell University, U.S., kz33@cornell.edu; and Jorge E. González, presidential professor of mechanical engineering, The City College of New York, U.S., jgonzalezcruz@ccny.cuny.edu.
 
For more information on the ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities, visit https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/sustainablebuildings. To learn more about the ASME Journal Program, visit www.asme.org/publications-submissions/journals/information-for-authors