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Lab members, Cary Faulkner, Yingli Lou, and Yizhi Yang received scholarships to attend the 2022 ASHRAE & IBPSA-USA BPAC and SimBuild Conference

Anonymous — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 16:36:05 +0000

Lab members, Cary Faulkner, Yingli Lou, and Yizhi Yang received scholarships to attend the 2022 ASHRAE & IBPSA-USA BPAC and SimBuild Conference Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 08/06/2022 - 10:36

Congratulation to lab members, Cary Faulkner, Yingli Lou, and Yizhi Yang, have been selected to receive up to $1500 in scholarship funds to attend the 2022 ASHRAE & IBPSA-USA BPAC and SimBuild Conference. The theme of the conference, “Better Buildings, Less Carbon: Supporting the Transition to A Clean and Just Climate” focuses on improving the decision-making process through the application of simulation and modeling over the entire building life cycle. More information about the conference can be found here.

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Lab PI, Dr. Wangda Zuo was invited by NCAR to give a presentation titled "Modeling Sustainable and Resilient Citied: Opportunities for Climate Prediction"

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 21:44:07 +0000

Lab PI, Dr. Wangda Zuo was invited by NCAR to give a presentation titled "Modeling Sustainable and Resilient Citied: Opportunities for Climate Prediction" Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/19/2022 - 15:44

On July 13, 2022, Lab PI, Dr. Wangda Zuo was invited by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to give a presentation titled "Modeling Sustainable and Resilient Citied: Opportunities for Climate Prediction".

This presentation discussed the needs of both short-term local weather and long-term climate prediction for the modeling of sustainable and resilient cities from an energy infrastructure system modeler's point of view. Dr. Zuo introduced some ongoing DOE and NSF projects in developing open-source models for sustainable and resilient cities which can be applied in various real-world applications, such as reducing energy consumption via net zero energy communities, minimizing building carbon emissions via emission-conscious operation, retrofitting existing buildings for long-term energy and emission reduction, improving outdoor environmental quality via urban farming in Indonesia, and increasing the resilience of our energy systems for an island community in Florida after Hurricane. During the discussion, the importance and the opportunities of having good short-term weather prediction and long-term climate prediction were revealed in the energy infrastructure models in those applications. More information about our research can be found here.

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Lab member, Yingli Lou, had successfully defended her PhD dissertation on “Interconnections of Energy Consumption, Carbon Emission, and Economic Impacts for Sustainable Buildings”.

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 19:11:53 +0000

Lab member, Yingli Lou, had successfully defended her PhD dissertation on “Interconnections of Energy Consumption, Carbon Emission, and Economic Impacts for Sustainable Buildings”. Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 07/13/2022 - 13:11

SBS lab member Yingli Lou successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis titled Interconnections of Energy Consumption, Carbon Emission, and Economic Impacts for Sustainable Buildings.

This dissertation aims to reveal the connections among building energy consumption, carbon emissions, and related economic impacts. First, this dissertation developed individualized empirical baselines for existing buildings in the operation stage that are consistent with their modeled baselines in the design stage. Second, this dissertation developed a novel method to predict the carbon emission reduction potential of building retrofits by using dynamically changing electricity emission factors under different clean energy adoption scenarios. At last, this dissertation proposed a systematic economic evaluation method to investigate the economic impacts of carbon emission trading schemes on building retrofits.

Dr. Yingli Lou's research focuses on building energy performance evaluation, large-scale building energy simulation, and carbon emissions from buildings. During the three years of her Ph.D. study, Yingli published 9 journal papers and developed the open-source Building Energy Models for Commercial Buildings Based on CBECS Data. In addition, she has contributed to multiple grant proposals and secured more than $5M projects from DOE and NSF.

Congratulations to Dr. Lou on this well-deserved success and wish her all the best in her professional career!

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Paper on The Economic Impacts of Carbon Emission Trading Scheme on Building Retrofits has been published in Building and Environment

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 19:46:14 +0000

Paper on The Economic Impacts of Carbon Emission Trading Scheme on Building Retrofits has been published in Building and Environment Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/30/2022 - 13:46

As a popular emission reduction tool, the carbon emission trading scheme (ETS) can potentially add an economic incentive for building owners to retrofit buildings in addition to the cost savings in energy. As a part of a comprehensive research project funded by US National Science Foundation, the Science Foundation Ireland, and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland, our team has investigated the additional economic benefits of building retrofits from carbon credits via the ETS. We found that carbon prices have significant economic impacts on building retrofits. With the relatively low forecasted time-variant carbon prices (around 10 USD per ton), the economic impacts of ETS on building retrofits are small. When carbon prices increase, the impacts of ETS would be up to 25% for 50 USD per ton (current prices in European Union) and 51% for 100 USD per ton.

This work has been published under the title “The economic impacts of carbon emission trading scheme on building retrofits: A case study with U.S. medium office buildings" in the journal Building and Environment. The full paper is available here.

The first author of this paper, Yingli Lou, is a Ph.D. student in the SBS lab, where her research focuses on large-scale building energy simulation and carbon emissions from buildings.

Congratulations to Yingli on publishing this paper!

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Paper on Tradeoffs Among Indoor Air Quality, Financial Costs, and CO2 Emissions for HVAC Operation Strategies to Mitigate Indoor Virus in U.S. Office Buildings has been published in Building and Environment

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 19:38:39 +0000

Paper on Tradeoffs Among Indoor Air Quality, Financial Costs, and CO2 Emissions for HVAC Operation Strategies to Mitigate Indoor Virus in U.S. Office Buildings has been published in Building and Environment Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/30/2022 - 13:38

It is challenging to provide excellent indoor air environment, while saving operational cost and reducing CO₂ emission. In this work, we explored the tradeoffs among indoor air quality, financial costs, and CO2 emissions for HVAC operation strategies to mitigate indoor virus in U.S. office buildings. New evaluation metrics are created to consider the comprehensive impact of improving IAQ on costs and CO2 emissions, using dynamic emission factors for electricity generation depending on the location. HVAC operation strategies are studied in five different locations across the United States, with distinct climates and electricity sources. In four of the five locations, MERV 13 filtration offers the best improvement in IAQ per increase in costs and emissions relative to MERV 10. The exception is the mildest climate of San Diego, where use of 100% outdoor air provides the best IAQ with a limited increase in costs and emissions.

This work has been published under the title "Tradeoffs Among Indoor Air Quality, Financial Costs, and CO2 Emissions for HVAC Operation Strategies to Mitigate Indoor Virus in U.S. Office Buildings " in the journal Building and Environment. The full paper is available at this link.

The first author of this paper, Cary Faulkner, is a Ph.D. student in the SBS lab and his research interests include building system modeling, computational fluid dynamics, indoor environment modeling, and machine learning.

Congratulations to Cary on publishing this paper!

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Paper on Evaluating Performance of Different Generative Adversarial Networks for Large-Scale Building Power Demand Prediction has been published in Energy and Buildings

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 19:21:47 +0000

Paper on Evaluating Performance of Different Generative Adversarial Networks for Large-Scale Building Power Demand Prediction has been published in Energy and Buildings Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/30/2022 - 13:21

How could we predict large-scale building power demand fast and accurately? Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), as a potential candidate, have recently attracted a lot of attention. This paper identified five promising GANs (Original GAN, cGAN, SGAN, InfoGAN, and ACGAN) and evaluates their performance for predicting building power demand at a large scale. As a result, cGAN and Original GAN are recommended.

This work has been published under the title “Evaluating Performance of Different Generative Adversarial Networks for Large-Scale Building Power Demand Prediction” in the journal Energy and Buildings. The full paper is available here.

The first author of this paper, Dr. Yunyang Ye, is the former member of the SBS Lab. He is currently a Research Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). His research focuses on building energy modeling, building code and standards analyses, urban scale modeling, building-to-grid integration, and energy policies.

Congratulations to Yunyang on publishing this paper!

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Paper on Fast and Accurate Modeling Approach for Water and Steam Thermodynamics with Practical Applications in District Heating System Simulation has been published in Energy

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Jun 2022 18:59:46 +0000

Paper on Fast and Accurate Modeling Approach for Water and Steam Thermodynamics with Practical Applications in District Heating System Simulation has been published in Energy Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/30/2022 - 12:59

Do you know that 97% of district heating systems in the US are steam based systems? However, we do not have Modelica models which can simulate such system effectively for practice. As a part of large collaborative research in developing URBANopt and Modelica Buildings library, we created a fast and accurate modeling approach for water and steam thermodynamics for real-world district heating system practice. This work presents a novel split-medium approach that implements numerically efficient liquid water models alongside various water/steam models, breaking costly algebraic loops by decoupling mass and energy balance equations. New component models for steam DH systems are also presented. The models are implemented in Modelica language and evaluated accuracy and computing speed across multiple scales: from fundamental thermodynamic properties to complete districts featuring 10 to 200 buildings. Compared to district models with the IF97 water/steam model and equipment models from the Modelica Standard Library, the new implementation improves the scaling rate for large districts from cubic to quadratic with negligible compromise to accuracy. For an annual simulation with 180 buildings, this translates to a computing time reduction from 33 to 1–1.5 h.

This work has been published under the title "A Fast and Accurate Modeling Approach for Water and Steam Thermodynamics with Practical Applications in District Heating System Simulation" in the journal Energy. The full paper is available here.

The first author of this paper, Kathryn (Katy) Hinkelman, is a Ph.D. student in the SBS Lab. Her research focuses on modeling and simulation of community-scale energy systems using Modelica language, including traditional district heating and cooling systems and innovative biomimetic (nature imitating) designs for future sustainable and resilient communities.

Congratulations to Katy on publishing this paper!

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Ph.D. student, Kathryn Hinkelman received the Marlene & Joseph Board Fellowship to attend the 2022 COBEE Conference.

Anonymous — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 23:01:52 +0000

Ph.D. student, Kathryn Hinkelman received the Marlene & Joseph Board Fellowship to attend the 2022 COBEE Conference. Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/28/2022 - 17:01

Ph.D. student, Kathryn (Katy) Hinkelman received 2022 Marlene & Joseph Borda Architectural Engineering Graduates Fellowships from Penn State University to attend the 5th International Conference on Building Energy and Environment (COBEE) in Montreal Canada, July 25-29, 2022. She will present her work titled "Ecosystem-Level Biomimicry for the Built Environment: Adopting Systems Ecology Principles for the Control of Heterogeneous Energy Systems" at the conference. This paper is co-authored by Dr. Michael Wetter from LBNL, the SBS lab director, Dr. Wangda Zuo, and the lab alumni Dr. Jing Wang and Dr. Sen Huang.

The purpose of the Marlene & Joseph Borda Architectural Engineering Graduates Fellowships is scholarly dissemination. It is for Architectural Engineering graduate students, enrolled in Ph.D., M.S. and M.Eng. degree programs at Penn State, who plan to present their research findings at a national or international meeting (conference, workshop, symposium, etc.).

We wish Katy safe travels and good luck with her presentation!

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Ph.D. candidate, Cary Faulkner received a travel grant to attend the 2022 ASHRAE Annual Conference.

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 20:35:25 +0000

Ph.D. candidate, Cary Faulkner received a travel grant to attend the 2022 ASHRAE Annual Conference. Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/25/2022 - 14:35

Ph.D. candidate, Cary Faulkner received a travel grant to attend the 2022 ASHRAE Annual Conference in Toronto. He will present his work titled "A Novel Physics-Informed Algorithm for Training AI Models to Predict Indoor Airflow" at one of the Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Modeling seminars. We wish him safe travels and good luck with his presentation!

Cary successfully passed his comprehensive examination at CU Boulder recently. His work is entitled "Advanced Modeling of HVAC Operation for Sustainable and Resilient Office Buildings During the COVID-19 Pandemic". Cary's research interests include building system modeling, computational fluid dynamics, indoor environment modeling, and machine learning. More insight about his scholarly activities and interests is available here.

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Lab member, Cary Faulkner is recognized as Ph.D. fellow for University of Nebraska Symposium.

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 20:27:13 +0000

Lab member, Cary Faulkner is recognized as Ph.D. fellow for University of Nebraska Symposium. Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/25/2022 - 14:27

Ph.D. candidate, Cary Faulkner was selected as a Ph.D. Fellow for this year’s University of Nebraska Lincoln Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction PhD Symposium. He will participate in the "Future of the Building Industry" workshop and present his research titled “Tradeoffs Between Indoor Air Quality and Costs During COVID-19 Pandemic” at the subsequent Ph.D. Symposium.

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