News

Congratulation to lab members, Cary Faulkner, Yingli Lou, and Yizhi Yang, have been selected to receive up to $1500 in scholarship funds to attend the 2022 ASHRAE & IBPSA-USA BPAC and SimBuild Conference. The theme of the conference, “Better Buildings, Less Carbon: Supporting the Transition to A Clean and Just...

On July 13, 2022, Lab PI, Dr. Wangda Zuo was invited by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to give a presentation titled "Modeling Sustainable and Resilient Citied: Opportunities for Climate Prediction". This presentation discussed the needs of both short-term local weather and long-term climate prediction for the modeling of...

SBS lab member Yingli Lou successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis titled Interconnections of Energy Consumption, Carbon Emission, and Economic Impacts for Sustainable Buildings. This dissertation aims to reveal the connections among building energy consumption, carbon emissions, and related economic impacts. First, this dissertation developed individualized empirical baselines for existing buildings...

As a popular emission reduction tool, the carbon emission trading scheme (ETS) can potentially add an economic incentive for building owners to retrofit buildings in addition to the cost savings in energy. As a part of a comprehensive research project funded by US National Science Foundation, the Science Foundation Ireland,...

It is challenging to provide excellent indoor air environment, while saving operational cost and reducing CO 2 emission. In this work, we explored the tradeoffs among indoor air quality, financial costs, and CO2 emissions for HVAC operation strategies to mitigate indoor virus in U.S. office buildings. New evaluation metrics are...

How could we predict large-scale building power demand fast and accurately? Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), as a potential candidate, have recently attracted a lot of attention. This paper identified five promising GANs (Original GAN, cGAN, SGAN, InfoGAN, and ACGAN) and evaluates their performance for predicting building power demand at a...

Do you know that 97% of district heating systems in the US are steam based systems? However, we do not have Modelica models which can simulate such system effectively for practice. As a part of large collaborative research in developing URBANopt and Modelica Buildings library, we created a fast and...

Ph.D. student, Kathryn (Katy) Hinkelman received 2022 Marlene & Joseph Borda Architectural Engineering Graduates Fellowships from Penn State University to attend the 5th International Conference on Building Energy and Environment ( COBEE ) in Montreal Canada, July 25-29, 2022. She will present her work titled "Ecosystem-Level Biomimicry for the Built...

Ph.D. candidate, Cary Faulkner received a travel grant to attend the 2022 ASHRAE Annual Conference in Toronto . He will present his work titled "A Novel Physics-Informed Algorithm for Training AI Models to Predict Indoor Airflow" at one of the Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Modeling seminars. We wish him safe...

Ph.D. candidate, Cary Faulkner was selected as a Ph.D. Fellow for this year’s University of Nebraska Lincoln Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction PhD Symposium. He will participate in the " Future of the Building Industry " workshop and present his research titled “Tradeoffs Between Indoor Air Quality and...