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.
This project developed and demonstrated novel techniques for cost-effective AFDD for Air Handling Units for small/medium commercial buildings. The diagnostic accuracy is over 95% and the payback period is less than two years.
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 and demonstrated a set of tools and approaches for generating and implementing building-specific control algorithms that minimize energy consumption and energy costs while maintaining occupant comfort. The general approach involves the use of model-based predictive control (MPC) with reduced-order models and inverse (data-driven) models for the building envelope, indoor environment, and plant.
CBEI created a series of training modules and a BRT training guide which was handed off to APPA International and BOMA International. To maintain consistency among all providers of BRT, APPA agreed to maintain the curriculum in a file sharing platform.
An automated Building Retuning report generator with Asset Score Preview reporting capability is complete. It has been used by Penn State students to generate reports for the “Leadership in Building Energy Efficiency” course as well as demonstrated to BOMA and APPA BRT training participants. It has been incorporated into the BRT course content.
The goal of this project was to demonstrate and evaluate a practical business case for implementation of the RTU Coordinator across multiple locations. This report provides a summary of the PnP algorithm, a description of the savings estimates for previous PnP evaluations, a description of site selection processes and savings results for the BoA sites, and a description of the final demonstration sites, implementations and preliminary results.
The project team demonstrated commitment from four training organizations to integrate Asset Score Tool training into their education and training programs.
The paper provides a review of literature on the building occupant behavioral characteristics.
As a member of the Subtask 5.4 Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ) assessment team, the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics (CBPD) at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) for Building 661 in Navy Yard, Philadelphia, PA, on July 10th, 2015.
Buildings consume over 40% of the total energy in the U.S. Over 90% of the buildings are less than 50,000 square feet in size. These buildings currently do not use building automation systems to monitor and control their building systems.
We still think of buildings as investments in things: real estate, land, technology. Yet, we build to provide an environment for people to work, live, learn, play and recover from illness. Investing in people requires a dual approach of reducing risks and promoting positive experience.
As much as 20 percent of energy consumed in commercial buildings is due to inefficient operations. This is energy that can be saved with operational improvements and does not require major capital investments.