Category: Publications

Journal Article Assessing ASHRAE Guideline 36 Published

Julia Ho on

Former SBS Lab member Cary Faulkner‘s paper titled “Simulation-based assessment of ASHRAE Guideline 36 (G36), considering energy performance, indoor air quality, and control stability” has been published in the journal Building and Environment.

The paper developed a VAV system in Modelica to test the influence of G36 on occupant thermal comfort, indoor air quality, control stability, and energy efficiency for air-side and water-side equipment. They found that although G36 slightly decreases thermal comfort, it significantly reduces annual energy consumption, increases indoor air quality, and eliminates CO2 discomfort through its use of demand controlled ventilation. The paper also found that local feedback control was important to ensure control stability when using G36. This study contributes to the body

This paper was the first to 1. assess the impact of G36 on indoor air quality, 2. consider control sequence interactions in water-side and air-side equipment for the system studied, and 3. examine short-term building behavior to evaluate control stability with G36.

The co-authors of the paper are Robert Lutes, former SBS Lab member Sen Huang, Wangda Zuo, and Draguna Vrabie. You can read the paper for free here until July 15, 2023.

Paper on Impacts of WELL Certification on Occupant Wellbeing Published in Building and Environment

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Congratulations to Nasim Ildiri on her paper, “Impact of WELL certification on occupant satisfaction and perceived health, well-being, and productivity: A multi-office pre- versus post-occupancy evaluation,” which has been published in the Building and Environment journal.

WELL Building Standard (WELL) is one of the most comprehensive and fastest growing standards that focuses primarily on the health and well-being of building occupants. However, there is a lack of systematic evaluation of the effectiveness of WELL in achieving its goal. The longitudinal study presented in this paper comprehensively analyzed the impacts of WELL certification on a large cohort of occupants from four perspectives: satisfaction with the workplace and perceived health (physical and mental), well-being, and productivity. The authors’ analyses showed that transitioning to WELL certified offices from non-WELL certified offices had a positive impact on occupants across all the studied parameters, with increases in means from pre- to post-occupancy being highly statistically significant.

The full paper can be found here.

Pre-versus post-occupancy occupant satisfaction responses. Box charts graphically indicate the concentration of the responses, where boxes represent the interquartile range (25th and 75th percentiles). Means and medians are displayed by bold dots and solid bars, respectively.

Paper on Daily Power Demand Prediction for Buildings at Large Scale has been published in Building Simulation

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Large scale power demand prediction for buildings plays a great role in stable operation and management for the grid. To predict large scale power demand in an accurate and fast way, our team has developed a new method called E-GAN, which combines a physics-based model (EnergyPlus) and a data-driven model (GAN), to predict the daily power demand for buildings at a large scale.

This work has been published under the title “Daily power demand prediction for buildings at a large scale using a hybrid of physics-based model and generative adversarial network ” in the journal Building Simulation. The full paper is available here.

The first author of this paper, Chenlu Tian, was a visiting Ph.D. scholar in the SBS lab, where her research focused on building data analysis using machine learning methods.

Congratulations to Chenlu on publishing this paper!