Buildings & Design
GRAND CHALLENGE
Economically viable zero net energy building systems
Buildings consume 72% of electricity, 40% of all energy, and produce close to 50% of U.S. carbon emissions. Most of the energy they consume is wasted. Buildings – commercial and residential – thus offer the greatest single scope for energy savings through efficiency. At The Institute for Energy Efficiency, researchers are developing new, highly efficient control systems for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, sensors, lighting, and fully integrated smart building technologies to realize dramatic savings in building energy consumption.
Projects
Smart Buildings/Integrated Building Systems
While substantial savings (10% to 30%) can be realized using existing hardware and modeling tools and algorithms (such as “Energy Plus”) for the retrofit of old, and the design of new buildings, much more can be achieved with modern approaches based on Dynamics of Energy Efficiency principles. Research includes Integrated Building Systems, where active control of indoor airflows can greatly improve the ventilation and efficiency of heating and cooling in buildings. A smart building containing an array of sensors and an integrated, optimized control system can adjust lighting and HVAC control based on actual usage rather than planned occupancy. Other research provides fluid dynamics, modeling and theories of mixing that underpin the optimal control problem. The Institute is collaborating in many of these areas with colleagues in Hong Kong, and the UCSB effort is being pursued in partnership with leading government (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) and commercial (United Technologies Corporation) laboratories.
Energy Harvesting
A host of environments produce considerable vibrational energy, such as automobiles, trains, aircraft, watercraft, machinery and buildings. Energy harvesters promise considerable gains in energy efficiency and production by the exploitation of novel couplings between flow, electrical, thermal, and acoustical fields and hold great promise for remote off-grid generation. Research includes nonlinear oscillators driven by both periodic and stochastic inputs, as well as nanofabrication to develop microgenerators that use mechanical energy to produce streaming currents in micro- and nano-devices, and the use of thermoacoustic generators for similar purposes.
Data Centers
An important special case of building design is the problem of data center buildings, where there are few people but extremely large heat loads from high power density arrays of computer servers. The cost of energy use in data centers is estimated at $3.3 billion/year and is projected to rise rapidly in proportion to internet usage and server demand. Data centers, even more than typical office and commercial buildings, require efficient ways of redistributing cooling energy. They present special and unique challenges in the modeling of the coupling between the computer uses and the cooling systems. The Institute is nucleating a combined effort of faculty in UCSB’s Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science departments, leading to new approaches and solutions for this special class of buildings.
Affiliations
The Center for Energy Efficiency Design (CEED).
Faculty
See listing of faculty in the Buildings & Design Solutions Group.
