UNS: Intelligent Multi-Criteria Building Ventilation Control within Dynamic Urban Environments

Drexel University, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

1511151 (Waring) Americans spend 90% of our time indoors, where poor indoor air quality (IAQ) is a top risk to human health and productivity. Maintaining acceptable IAQ requires ventilation, or replacing indoor with outdoor air, usually by mechanical systems. Ventilation rates are set as minimum standards for commercial buildings (e.g. 8.5 L/s/person for offices), though new research suggests that higher rates increase occupant productivity and decrease absenteeism. However, increasing ventilation requires energy to move and condition the air, can strain the electricity grid, and can degrade IAQ in polluted urban areas. The current minimum ventilation rate paradigm is simplistic, with no framework for evaluating most of these numerous and competing positive and negative consequences. As such, many opportunities are missed for promoting environmental sustainability, including increasing occupant wellbeing, improving energy efficiency, and reducing greenhouse gas and local pollutant emissions. The purpose of this project is to capitalize on these opportunities by researching next-generation, intelligent ventilation strategies for high performance green buildings. Since elements such as weather, pollution, and energy prices have diurnal and seasonal profiles, large benefits may be realized at minimal energy costs with systems-level strategies that capitalize on transient behaviors within a dynamic control framework. This project will research dynamic, holistic, multi-criteria ventilation control in green office buildings. It will: (1) Formalize a user-oriented, multi-criteria decision-making framework with a comprehensive and flexible utility function, and evaluate the impacts of intelligent ventilation in a variety of settings with special attention to the influence of building and location characteristics, and (2) Investigate self-learning, plug-and-play dynamic ventilation control methods that can adapt to specific office buildings and meet the unique challenges of the building industry. It will assess impacts and develop control algorithms with detailed simulations, as well as validate the work in a real building in Philadelphia that is already instrumented to measure pollutants and energy use. Results will be disseminated to (i) the public through a web display of the real-time state of the experimental building; to (ii) the scientific community through conference and journal publications and investigator affiliations with the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation; and to (iii) industry through affiliations with technical committees in the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).