The presentations, news, research summaries, reports, and technology overviews are collected here by focus area and represent the body of work developed by the CBEI partners during the 5-year project period. For additional information on market challenges, approach, and impacts, see each focus area overview.
The question, addressed by this project, is how to cost effectively save space conditioning energy and dollars in buildings with ducted constant air supply systems, particularly since many of these older central city buildings are 50% or less occupied. The problem for these older systems is how to design a low cost VAV system.
CBEI researchers worked with a local HVAC contractor to test a unique approach to this problem and determine the energy performance of a potential low cost option.
CBEI research has demonstrated through simulation that, for selected building types over a range of climate zones, HVAC package solutions exist that have the potential to provide at least 50% HVAC energy savings with a simple payback of 4 years or less.
This report is the pdf version of the CBEI Final report and results.
This project implemented, validated and documented an automated system for training virtual refrigerant charge sensors for rooftop unit ACs. The system automatically tunes empirical parameters of a virtual sensor for estimating the amount of refrigerant in a system. The engineering time and costs associated with calibrating a virtual sensor are reduced because of the automated testing in an open laboratory and the reduced number of tests.
CBEI facilitated integrated visioning, expert workshops and design charrettes for Building 661, which contributed to the development of a report on enclosure technologies with an emphasis on engaging the building systems and systems integration critical to high performance retrofits. The report is focused on typical (older) small commercial buildings.
Widespread deployment of advanced controls and diagnostics in small and medium buildings has been held back by the cost and complexity involved in applying these solutions to individual buildings. CBEI demonstrated data?driven adaptive, self?learning control?oriented models for building HVAC sub?systems and building thermal and envelope dynamics in two medium buildings.
CBEI developed a roadmap to guide technology research. The roadmap is focused on conducting research using existing and state-of-the-art building components and systems in an integrated fashion.