Projects

The Eco-Park Learning Center is a future municipal office building and community center owned and operated by Prince William County, VA. The Learning Center develops the County’s vision of the landfill as an eco-park – a nexus for interactive STEM education, community and professional engagement, and the demonstration of cutting-edge waste management technologies. It will house the county’s Solid Waste Division administrative offices, while serving as a venue hosting school groups, professional meetings, and larger community events. 

The decentralization of infrastructure is critical to long term urban resilience and resource equity. Current centralized models are prone to single point of failure and distribution inefficiencies that lead to waste. Often this wastefulness is exacerbated by mismatches between resource availability and demand at large scales. The proliferation of renewable energy technologies in the past decade has paved the way towards a more diverse and decentralized infrastructure, especially with respect to solar energy.

Harvesting the energy saving potential in the process of retrofit actions presents an opportunity to improve the overall performance of tobacco growing operations and at the same time reduces the environmental footprint of the industry. Little was known about the actual impact of retrofit scenarios on the energy consumption of the curing process. Energy simulation tools exist in a simple form for homeowners and in highly sophisticated applications for designers and facility managers. However, none of those can be directly applied for the assessment of energy consumption in curing barns.

Students from Virginia Tech and Virginia Western Community College participated in an unusual experiment: In the name of fire safety, two nearly identical residence hall rooms, one with and one without a sprinkler system, were set on fire.