Category: jake

Congratulations to Jake Castellini for Passing His Ph.D. Defense

Nathan Kurtz on

Congratulations to Jake Castellini on passing his Ph.D. defense. Jake became the SBS Lab’s 10th Ph.D. graduate which is a massive milestone. Jake’s research applies his computational fluid dynamics expertise from the automotive industry to the indoor environment. He developed novel surrogate models using uncertainty analysis to improve the accuracy of fast indoor contaminant models. During his research, Jake published 6 journal papers and has 2 more under preparation. We appreciate the support of Jake’s committee members. It has been great to be alongside Jake throughout his research.

SBS Celebrates the Graduation of the Final Cohort of Graduate Students at CU Boulder

Nathan Kurtz on

The SBS lab celebrated the graduation of the final cohort of CU Boulder graduate students. Congratulations to the two Ph.D. students in Mechanical Engineering Cary Faulkner and Jake Castellini as well as our M.S. graduate in Architectural Engineering David Milner. It has been an honor and pleasure to work with all of these wonderful researchers over the past several years. It has been a joy to celebrate their achievements together and we wish them the best of luck in their future careers.

Jake Castellini’s Paper Accepted to Building Simulation Journal

Julia Ho on

SBS lab member Jake Castellini’s paper, titled “Quantifying Spatiotemporal Variability in Occupant Exposure to an Indoor Airborne Contaminant with an Uncertain Source Location,” was published in the journal Building Simulation this month. He worked with fellow lab member Cary Faulkner and Michael Sohn of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to complete this project, which was sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Most models simulating occupant exposure to contaminants in buildings use well-mixed zone models, which assume that contaminant levels are the same throughout a room (or zone). However, these models can under-predict high concentrations of contaminants because of this assumption. In contrast, CFD models are able to predict spatiotemporal variation but are computationally expensive. Jake’s paper describes a new method to parametrically characterize the spatiotemporal variability observed in CFD simulations as a first step in developing stochastic room surrogate models to replace well-mixed room representations.

Congratulations to Jake! His paper can be found for free here: https://rdcu.be/c7j8C

 

Jake Castellini Presents at ASHRAE Conference

Julia Ho on

SBS Lab PhD candidate Jake Castellini presented at the 2023 ASHRAE Winter Conference with a generous scholarship from the ASHRAE Rocky Mountain Chapter. He presented on his paper using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling to investigate the impact of different portable air cleaner (PAC) locations on the transport of airborne contaminants like COVID-19 within a conference room. Great job on your well-received presentation, Jake!

We send a grateful thank you to the ASHRAE Rocky Mountain chapter for supporting our lab members.

You can find the paper on which Jake based his presentation here.

Jake Castellini Passes Comprehensive Exam

Julia Ho on

Go Jake! The SBS Lab’s now-PhD candidate Jake Castellini passed his comprehensive exam on Friday at CU Boulder. His PhD research focuses on investigating spatiotemporal uncertainty in indoor airborne contaminant transport. We wish Jake the best of luck while entering the next phase of his PhD work.

Lab Members Attend SimBuild 2022 Conference

Julia Ho on

Five SBS Lab researchers attended the SimBuild 2022 conference held in Chicago, IL on September 14-16, along with Professor Wangda Zuo. Three of those lab members, Yingli Lou, Kathryn Hinkelman, and Cary Faulkner, presented research while attending. The focus of this year’s conference was “Better Buildings, Less Carbon: Supporting the Transition to A Clean and Just Climate.” We are proud to say that the lab members in attendance have contributed significantly to this aim through their research, and we are excited to see more of their accomplishments in the future.

Yizhi Yang, Yingli Luo, and Cary Faulkner were funded by the SimBuild conference scholarship, receiving three of the 11 offered awards. Kathryn Hinkelman was funded by the US Department of Energy’s iBuild Fellowship. John Castellini was supported by CU Boulder’s departmental travel grant.

Congratulations, all!

Photos from left to right: team photo at the SimBuild conference; Kathryn Hinkelman presenting; team celebration dinner.

Paper on Assessing the Performance of Portable Air Cleaners in a Conference Room has been published in Building and Environment

wmz5108 on

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted a need for strategies to mitigate the risk of airborne disease transmission in shared indoor spaces. In an effort to better understand indoor airborne contaminant transport funded through DTRA and in partnership with LBNL, this work presents a methodology for simultaneously simulating aerosol dispersion from multiple source locations in CFD and metrics for assessing the in-room performance of different ventilation strategies. Using these methods engineers can efficiently assess the performance of different ventilation strategies at removing contaminants from the occupied region of the room.

This work has been published under the title “Assessing the Use of Portable Air Cleaners for Reducing Exposure to Airborne Diseases in a Conference Room with Thermal Stratification” in the journal Building and Environment. The full paper is available at this link.

The first author of this paper, Jake Castellini, is a Ph.D. student in the SBS Lab, where his research focuses on the application of efficient CFD and well-mixed modeling techniques to the understanding of indoor transmission of airborne pathogens.

Congratulations to Jake on publishing this paper!

sbs lab

(Contours of the room averaged contaminant concentration for the baseline case normalized by the average breath-zone concentration)