Research at the Center for High Performance Buildings involves 3 main categories:
- Building Technology and Systems
- Indoor Environment and Human Perception
- High Performance Equipment
Building Technology Systems
This focus area addresses the
development, evaluation, and integration of building technologies that can improve occupant comfort and reduce energy usage and operating costs. This includes advanced envelopes, ventilation, comfort delivery, primary equipment, sensing, controls, and diagnostics. The work also includes the development of
modeling and optimization tools useful in the design and analysis of advanced building technologies and systems.
It is a multi-disciplinary effort
involving faculty from mechanical, civil, and electrical and computer engineering. There are a variety of testbeds available for demonstrating and evaluating building technologies, including reconfigurable living laboratories that are office spaces for graduate students, a reconfigurable indoor chamber for studying comfort delivery systems, room-scale unoccupied test spaces that allow systematic of study of the combined impact of envelope/facade systems, lighting and thermal systems and controls on energy and comfort, etc.
Indoor Environment and Human Perception
Understanding and modeling the interaction between occupants and their indoor environments is a major focus area for the CHPB. The work involves faculty from both engineering and psychology who study human interactions with thermal, indoor air quality (IAQ), lighting, acoustic, and vibration conditions.
The primary goals are to
understand the influence of
these conditions on occupant satisfaction, comfort, perceived IAQ (PIAQ), and performance in order to develop better building designs and controls and to work towards indoor environments that promote human health. The group has access to some very unique research facilities, including a
perception-based engineering (PBE) laboratory to study combined impacts of lighting, acoustics, air quality, vibration, temperature, humidity and air flow on occupant perceptions and performance in a controlled manner, reconfigurable living
laboratory offices that allow testing for impacts of new building technologies on human performance indices in a real-world setting, and IAQ chambers.
High Performance Equipment
Faculty within the CHPB have a long history of research related to primary and secondary HVAC&R; equipment used in buildings, including compressors, heat exchangers, expansion valves, vapor compression heat
pumps and air conditioners,
alternative heat pumping and
refrigeration cycles, furnaces, household appliances (refrigerators, water heaters, dryers, dishwashers), etc.
Examples of recent technology development and evaluation includes novel compressor technologies, high performance heat pumps for extreme climates, liquid-flooded Ericsson cycles for low temperature cooling and high temperature power production, work recovery devices for cooling equipment.
Another focus area has been development of improved modeling approaches useful for design and analysis of equipment, including for compressors, vapor compression equipment, geothermal heat exchange, heat exchanger fouling, small-scale power production, etc. The group has access to variety of state-of-art equipment test facilities, including compressor calorimeter and high gas-bypass test stands, a heat exchanger facility for evaluating performance and fouling effects, two pairs of psychrometric chambers for testing of heat pumps and air conditioners, and a geothermal bore field for testing new technologies, controls, and modeling approaches.