The primary consumers of building energy are heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting systems, which maintain occupant comfort, and electronics and appliances that enable occupant functionality. The optimization of building energy is therefore a complex problem highly dependent on unique building and environmental conditions as well as on time dependent operational factors. To provide comput...

We describe a social game that we designed for encouraging energy efficient behavior amongst building occupants with the aim of reducing overall energy consumption in the building. Occupants vote for their desired lighting level and win points which are used in a lottery based on how far their vote is from the maximum setting. We assume that the occupants are utility maximizers and that their u...

We study providing ancillary service to the power grid by using the flexibility of HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) systems in commercial buildings. The building HVAC system’s thermal and power consumption models are constructed and key model parameters are estimated from measure data from Pugh Hall of University of Florida. We develop a method for optimal output tracking of a time...

In the present work, human thermal comfort is investigated within the built environment. The analysis is based on two building thermal simulation models. In the first one Nodal Network – the air condition (such as, air temperature and velocity) within each thermal zone is assumed uniform and therefore, all zone occupants are exposed to the same condition. In the second model – Nodal NetworkCFD ...

In Brazil, the delivery of homes for low-inc ome households is dictated by costs rather than performance. Issues such as impact climate change, affordability operational energy use, and lack security are not taken into account, even though they can severely occupants. this work, authors evaluated thermal performance two affordable houses as-built after integration envelope improvements. A new r...

Occupant satisfaction with indoor environmental conditions are in close relation to energy consumption in buildings. Despite the increasing efforts to maintain thermal comfort conditions in buildings with control strategies, occupants are not usually satisfied, and, thus, change their behavior which generally interfere with building operation systems. Therefore, modeling and characterizing occu...

Fig.1: Figure 1. Facade of non-renovated and renovated buildings WHICH ARE YOUR ARCHITECTURAL (R)SOLUTIONS TO THE SOCIAL, ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES OF TODAY? Research summary Recent research has shown large differences between the expected and the actual energy consumption in buildings. The differences have been attributed partially, to the assumptions made during the design phase o...