Awareness of global warming and the extent of greenhouse gas emissions have focused more attention upon energy efficiency in building. Moreover, the inventory of “green” office space in the United States has increased dramatically since the introduction of rating schemes that attest to the energy efficiency or sustainability of commercial buildings. In some metropolitan areas, the supply of cer...

Air conditioning (AC) systems are responsible for the major percentage of energy consumption in buildings. Shared spaces constitute considerable office space area, in which most office employees perform their meetings and daily tasks, and therefore the ACs in these areas have significant impact on the energy usage of the entire office building. The cost of this energy consumption, however, is n...

We analyzed acoustic satisfaction in office environments in buildings surveyed by The Center For The Built Environment (CBE). A total of 23,450 respondents from 142 buildings were included in the analysis. Acoustic satisfaction in the CBE survey is a function of satisfaction with both noise and speech privacy. In the database people are significantly more dissatisfied with speech privacy than n...

Overview In the 1998-99 school year, U.S. K-12 public schools provided instruction to over 46 million students. An estimated 70% of all school buildings have indoor air quality (IAQ) problems, leading to an unhealthy environment. Because children breathe a greater volume of air relative to their body weight compared to adults, they may be more sensitive to indoor air pollution. Additionally, oc...

Although several studies have investigated the effect of degradation on the behavior of structures, investigations on collapse margin ratios are rare in the literature. In this study, the effect of strength and stiffness degradation on collapse capacity of steel moment frames is investigated. The aim is to determine margin of safety against collapse using a probabilistic approach. For this reas...

Thermostats are primary interfaces for occupants of office buildings to express their comfort preferences. However, standard thermostats are often ineffective due to inaccessibility, lack of information, or limited responsiveness, leading to occupant discomfort. Software thermostats based on web or smartphone applications provide alternative interfaces to occupants with minimal deployment cost....

Active participation of demand-side resources in power system control tasks, i.e., demand response, is expected to facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources in the grid. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical control scheme to enable provision of frequency control reserves by a pool of office buildings managed by an aggregator. The reserves are provided by controlling the c...

Plug load energy consumption represents up to 40% of the total energy consumption in efficient buildings. Occupant behavior has a huge impact on plug load energy consumption. Studies have shown that up to 40% plug load energy savings can be achieved through users’ engagement in sustainable behaviors. To save energy from plug loads, either a company can replace their appliances with more efficie...