Center for the Built Environment (CBE)

This summer five members of the CBE community received recognition for conference papers and career contributions, plust travel funding to support conference participation. Three of the awards were presented at the 2024 ASHRAE Annual Conference, and two at Indoor Air 2024. The recipients are Gail Brager, Carlos Duarte, Riwayat Katia, Paul Raftery and Ruiji Sun. We invite you to see our recent post to read about these well-deserved awards and the efforts leading to them. https://lnkd.in/gCnJWBMh

Thank you Katherine Exss Cid for spending time and sharing your insights with our team. We are grateful to you and so many visiting scholars who add much value to our center.

A newly published paper reports on a study in a zero-energy building in Singapore that compared cooling using a radiant system to an air system. While previous research by CBE and others shows that hydronic radiant systems show potential for creating highly efficient space conditioning, this new work is significant as less research has been done in tropical regions, including those experiencing rapid population growth and urbanization. The study showed that comfort was good in both cases, with about 60% of the test subjects being satisfied with thermal conditions at a temperature of 26°C (79°F).?However, energy performance varied as the radiant system extracted 33% more heat from the space, requiring less power for moving cooling fluid and air. The radiant system used 4% less energy than the air system at 26°C (79°F)?and 34% less energy at 23°C (73°F). Key contributors include Jiayu Li,?Jovan Pantelic,?Coleman B. Merchant Kian Wee Chen,?Ippei Izuhara,?Ryosuke Yuki,?Forrest Meggers and Stefano Schiavon. ? https://lnkd.in/gbvBdVmA #radiant #HVAC #ZEB #buildingscience

Cities are getting hotter. Can buildings and neighborhoods be designed to bring in more wind?

A newly published paper reports on a study in a zero-energy building in Singapore that compared cooling using a radiant system to an air system. While previous research by CBE and others shows that hydronic radiant systems show potential for creating highly efficient space conditioning, this work is significant as less research has been done in tropical regions, including those experiencing rapid population growth and urbanization. The study showed that comfort was good in both cases, with about 60% of the test subjects being satisfied with thermal conditions at a temperature of 26°C (79°F).?However, energy performance varied as the radiant system extracted 33% more heat from the space, requiring less power for moving cooling fluid and air. The radiant system used 4% less energy than the air system at 26°C (79°F)?and 34% less energy at 23°C (73°F). The radiant panel system used in the study, from CBE consortium member Sanken Setubi Kogyo Co.,Ltd (https://skk.jp/en/) and its US subsidiary @Global Environmental Technologies Inc., has a unique convection-enhanced design that is intended to improve performance. (CBE previously reported that this system was included in the renovation of CBE’s Controlled Environment Chamber: https://lnkd.in/gAM9_B8A) The key contributors include Jiayu Li,? Jovan Pantelic, Coleman B. Merchant, Kian Wee Chen,?Ippei Izuhara,?Ryosuke Yuki,?Forrest Meggers and Stefano Schiavon. Full citation and link to paper: Li, Jiayu, et al. (2024) 'Comparison of the Environmental, Energy, and Thermal Comfort Performance of Air and Radiant Cooling Systems in a Zero-Energy Office Building in Singapore.' Energy and Buildings, 318: 114487. https://lnkd.in/gvMCY3bG

CBE's research team is excited to collaborate with CIEE and this team of building industry leaders. Initial work will be presented at CBE's Industry Advisory Board meeting in October, and people are welcome to post below or message us if you would like to receive updates on these topics.

Architecture and other environmental design educators, please take note of these new resources available for your use. #architecture #design UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design

This new paper, completed in collaboration with our friends at the University of Sydney, builds on earlier research to further disprove the idea that there is one ideal temperature that leads to peak productivity. As with many indoor environmental questions, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

This spring CBE’s research team was awarded two large grants from the California Energy Commission. Both projects are multi-year efforts, each with a wide range of research activities and deliverables, and they leverage CBE’s collective knowledge, capabilities and our extensive network of industry and academic partners. We will collaborate the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE) who will manage the work with CBE and numerous contributors listed below. One project will demonstrate a large new-to-market heat recovery chiller that uses a refrigerant with an ultra-low GWP. This will be tested in in collaboration with a California health care partner with an extensive portfolio of hospital facilities, in order to make it easier to scale this demonstration to other hospitals.?It will be led by Paul Raftery and Therese Peffer, and the team also includes Taylor Engineers and Lawrence Berkeley Labs. Read more at: https://lnkd.in/gAckgEGc The other project aims to advance the adoption personal comfort devices by creating and testing new products, including a hub and ecosystem to connect them and also to link with building control systems. The CBE and CIEE team will include charlie huizenga, Hui Zhang, Tobias Kramer and Therese Peffer. Our project team also includes contributors from TRC Companies, Inc., Normal Software, Arup, Lawrence Berkeley Labs and the University of Notre Dame.?More details are listed on this project page: https://lnkd.in/grtA_h7K https://lnkd.in/geCZmaZM #zerocarbon #comfort #HVAC #decarbonization #buildings

This conference looks very promising, with CBE researchers, our consortium partners and other sustainability leaders presenting many critical strategies, topics and technologies.