EFRI-SEED: Risk Conscious Design and Retrofit of Buildings for Low Energy

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

The objective of this EFRI-SEED research is to identify and quantify uncertainty distributions of parameters affecting building performance at different system scales and in different model types. The research will analyze and generalize the parameter distributions and correlate them with building type, age, system design, architectural design characteristics, morphological parameters, experimental nature of technologies, urban context, and type of occupant organization. The different sources of uncertainty in building performance will be carefully characterized and statistically validated. Using data from 240 monitored buildings, the modeling and calibration of uncertainties will be conducted at five distinct system scales: Meteorological-Urban-Building-System-Occupant. Their effect on outcomes will be correlated to urban and architectural design parameters, such as spatial and envelope complexity. This work will provide the theory and models to support this approach and will demonstrate this in two applications which are receiving strong public interest: (1) a large scale energy retrofit, and (2) design of a net-zero energy building (NZEB). In addition, it will develop an environment in which proposed energy systems can be benchmarked at whole building scale under uncertainty. This environment will be offered to other awarded EFRI-SEED projects to test their systems under real-life, uncertain system properties and conditions. A new approach to the design of low-energy buildings and energy retrofits is offered. This will remove a detrimental barrier from current deficient decision making typically based on single best estimate predictions. Owners will ask for better guarantees that a certain predicted energy saving will be accomplished. The proposed approach will specifically show how uncertainty influences decisions and how tradeoffs between extra investments and energy saving can be judged in a risk-conscious way. This research requires a highly interdisciplinary approach between building modeling and simulation experts, systems design theorists, statisticians, architectural and urban designers, energy technologists, and auditing experts. The research team combines all of these disciplines. Students from three different research labs on the GT campus (in Architecture, Mechanical Engineering, and Industrial and Systems Engineering) will profit from this cross-disciplinary component in their graduate and postgraduate education. The education plan in the proposed effort will result in rigorous training of a diverse group of students with solid backgrounds in computational energy modeling, architectural design theory and practice, statistical methods, systems engineering, and numerical analysis. The FY 2010 EFRI-SEED Topic that supports this project was sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorates for Engineering (ENG), Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), and Computer & Information Science and Engineering in collaboration with the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).