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SBS Lab US-Ireland R&D project team at Ulster University

Nathan Kurtz on

Last week, Prof. Zuo and Ph.D. student Yizhi Yang attended the joint project meeting at Ulster University. They were able to meet and discuss their joint US-NI-Rol project “Intelligent Data Harvesting for Multi-Scale Building Stock Classification and Energy Performance Prediction.” While the SBS team was in Belfast, Northern Ireland they were able to visit and tour Ulster University’s heat pump facility. The team also met with officers from the Department for the Economy NI to better tune their research to support the policy-making process regarding energy-efficient buildings and renewable energy.

This research project is supported by National Science Foundation (NSF), Department for the Economy NI, and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). The project is a collaborative project with Pennsylvania State University, University College Dublin, and Ulster University. The project aims to reduce residential building energy consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions across the three jurisdictions. This goal is being achieved by using the expertise in green engineering from the NI team, building modeling and machine learning from the US team, and the information theory of the RoI team. We are thankful for the warm and generous welcome from the Ulster University team and excited to continue working with all parties on this important research project.

 

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

Julia Ho on

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.