Publications

2019

The management of society’s waste, once overlooked as a burden to simply dump onto the Earth, has grown in public awareness during the last several decades as critical to sustainable planning. For the 2020 Solar Decathlon Design Competition, we are excited to work with a client that is setting the gold standard for contemporary waste management in our home state of Virginia.

The TreeHaus is a design for a net-positive, regenerative housing development inspired by the way trees collect and distribute resources in the forest. The goal of the project is to create a building that strengthens its surrounding environment and municipality by imagining it as a constituent of its contextual ecology. The TreeHaus will harness energy from the sun, harvest water from the rain, and cycle resources and information throughout its community in the same way that plants and trees do through networks in nature.

Over the past years, a growing trend of utilizing camera-equipped drones for periodical building facade inspection has emerged. Building façade anomalies, such as cracks and erosion, can be detected through analyzing drone-captured video, photographs, and infrared images. Such anomalies are known to have an impact on various building performance aspects, e.g., thermal, energy, moisture control issues. Current research efforts mainly focus on computational image processing methods to recognize certain types of facade anomalies.

With the growing concern of climate change and more frequent and severe natural disaster events affecting the built environment, enhancing the performance and resilience of buildings has become increasingly vital. Stakeholders are seeking guidance towards improving both the individual performance of buildings and systems as well as their overall disaster resilience. Thus, they require tools that can comparatively evaluate technologies across multiple standards and qualities of construction in a consistent way.

2018

Utilization of phase change materials (PCMs) in building enclosures as thermal energy storage systems (TES) has become a re-appearing topic within the research community in recent years. PCMs represent an innovative solution that can contribute to the improvement of energy efficiency and thermal performance of buildings. This paper aims to present results of experimental investigations regarding the effectiveness and differences of PCM positioning within building enclosures in terms of energy performance and thermal comfort.

In high-performing building enclosures, the reduction of heat losses can lead to higher accumulations of moisture from condensation and vapor diffusion phenomena, which in turn can lead to rot, corrosion, mold, and overall deterioration of buildings. Building construction professionals have the unique opportunity to catch design and construction errors, which if unattended will lead to costly repairs down the road. New materials, frequent change orders on site, or process changes can have a lasting and expensive impact on functionality and durability of enclosure systems.

2016

Resilient and sustainable multi-hazard building design can significantly benefit from a holistic approach that considers hazards in the context of the full building life-cycle. Sustainability of a building is dependent not only on well-defined impacts from initial design, construction, and operation, but also those associated with uncertain future hazards.

2014

There are probably more than a million fume hoods operated in laboratories throughout the United States. Most of these fume hoods still run under more or less continuous conditions and thus consume an enormous amount of energy per year. There seems to be a significant savings potential if the total exhausted volumes could be reduced while all safety requirements are met. Researchers have meanwhile developed and identified high-performance fume hood solutions that could facilitate a reduction of up to 75% of the consumed energy required to condition make-up air.

2013

Tobacco curing is an energy intensive process that has made some progress in automation, but overall has not significantly changed over the past decades. In this report the authors evaluated the most practical and also typical retrofit scenarios, such as envelope improvements and the installation of an automated control systems. In terms of their anticipated impact on energy savings the different opportunities ranged from around 6% for added control strategies to around 12% for typical standard envelope improvements.

2012

This work is part of a regional initiative to build training and employment services into a career pathways system for the green building industry sector, with a particular focus on construction and retrofitting towards more energy-efficient buildings, and installation of alternative energy systems. It addressed the challenges of collecting and disseminating relevant information for innovative technologies and sustainability in a format that supports systems integration. The research team developed a collaborative content authoring and dissemination portal as part of an U.S.

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