Design and commissioning of a facility for studying next-generation high performance building technologies and their interactions with occupants.

Summary

Next-generation high-performance building technologies are envisioned where buildings are assembled on-site from factory-manufactured modular elements, which would lead to better quality control, less material waste, more predictable schedules, and consequent savings in cost and energy consumption. Prefabricated building elements would enable the cost-effective integration of climate-responsive building envelopes, localized thermal comfort delivery systems, and decentralized heating and cooling technologies such as wall-embedded micro-heat pumps, sensors, embedded intelligence, and networking, lowering the cost of resilient and decarbonizing technologies. These modular elements can integrate the smart technology needed to provide scalable, cost-effective solutions with autonomous, occupant-responsive, healthy, and sustainable features.
To explore and evaluate these new high-performance building technologies and study novel interfaces for their interaction with occupants, a new test facility has been designed and constructed. The facility has a modular construction layout utilizing reconfigurable thermally active panels for walls, floor, and ceiling. The interior surface temperature of each 3.05m × 1.22m (4 ft. x 10 ft.) panel can be controlled individually using a hot and cold water hydronic system. Based on the commissioning results, the controllability range of each panel surface temperature was achieved between 15°C to 35°C. This allows for formulating different climate zones, building type conditions, and enables studies on localized comfort delivery, occupant comfort control, active building materials, among others. This paper presents the overall design of the facility, controller tuning, and commissioning results.

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Pages: 11 p.

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Details

  • Original title: Design and commissioning of a facility for studying next-generation high performance building technologies and their interactions with occupants.
  • Record ID : 30032916
  • Languages: English
  • Subject: Technology
  • Source: 2024 Purdue Conferences. 8th International High Performance Buildings Conference at Purdue.
  • Publication date: 2024/07/15

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