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 paper presents a detailed study on the influence of building envelope upon the building’s life cycle performance and optimizes the design of the building envelope con-figurations, based on the detailed results obtained from a computational framework in which the whole-building energy simulation program of EnergyPlus v6.0 is coupled with GenOpt v3.0 generic optimization tool.
Mesh generation is a critical and manually intensive step in CFD simulations in the architectural domain. This paper presents an approach to generate adaptive hexahedral-dominate meshes for CFD simulations in sustainable architectural design applications.
Medium office buildings in the Greater Philadelphia offer high potential to reduce building energy consumption. This study assesses the impact of a wide set of ECMs in combinations as retrofit packages, and which combinations offer the most energy conservation for a given investment.
A BIM Planning Guide for Retrofit Projects was developed that enables design teams to quickly plan the use of energy and other model adoption process early in a project.
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.
Recent developments in building controls and diagnostics techniques promise to improve occupant comfort while minimizing energy consumption. A new generation of Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) for building automation systems is needed to allow facility managers to leverage the potential of advanced controls and diagnostics. In this paper we will describe a design process and the end product, a novel HMI prototype and the system that supports it. The system is an integration of advanced algorithms, an underlying software architecture, building equipment, and the human operators that use it.
The airflow in enclosed environments is a wall bounded flow, consisting of circulation, flow separation, and thermal plumes in transitional to fully developed turbulence. This study developed a new Detached Eddy Simulation model for indoor airflow using a semi-v2f model, and this model correctly predicted near-wall flows. This study applied the new DES model to a mixed-ventilation and a strong buoyancy-driven flow in rooms.
Fluid Dynamics (FFD) could be potentially used for real-time indoor airflow simulations. This study developed two-dimensional Fast Fluid Dynamics (2D FFD) into three-dimensional Fast Fluid Dynamics (3D FFD) and improved the data structure for handling computational domain with more complex geometry.
This project develops a calibrated occupant behavior module that aids building design & operation by simulating user impacts on energy use.
Designed for energy optimization of building retrofit projects. Applicable to new buildings and other projects. Empire State Building Example: Display the relevant metrics (here it’s NPV and CO2 savings). Include uncertainty and sensitivity about future projections.
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.
RTUs serve 60% of commercial floor space and account for about 150 Terawatt hours of annual electrical usage (~1.56 Quads of primary energy) and about $15B in electric bills in the US.
Implementing a deep energy retrofit, to achieve a 40 to 50% building level efficiency improvement, on a small to medium sized building is not financially viable as a single project. Therefore, creating an energy asset management plan that manages “deep energy retrofit triggers” over time is very important to consider.