High Performance Buildings

A water-side economizer (WSE) is a cooling system by which the chilled water is cooled by the cooling tower directly/indirectly without the use of mechanical cooling. Employing WSEs can decrease the building energy consumption by reducing the chiller operating time or increasing the chiller efficiency. WSEs, however, may pose challenges...

We developed an open-source, free software package (see the following links) which provides practical, end-to-end (from the IT equipment to heat rejection to the ambient) modeling and optimization for data center cooling. It can be used as a stand-alone tool by data center designers, service consultants and facility managers, or...

Previously, Virtual Reality seemed to be an application only possible in science fiction movies. However, with recent advances this technology has now become available to the general public. Pioneers in this field such as Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, and PlayStation VR have provided a path for consumers to create applications...

Improving the energy efficiency of chilled water plants is important since they account for about 35% the energy consumed by commercial building cooling equipment in the U.S. Model predictive control is a feasible way to enhance the operational efficiency of the chilled water plants. Our research is to develop a...

Located in Tropical climate, buildings in Miami requires cooling around the year. Space conditioning and domestic hot water systems account for 41% of all energy usage in a hotel. To save the energy for space cooling and domestic hot water heating, we proposed a heat recovery system which pre-heats the...

Sponsored by University of Miami This project aims to develop image enhancement techniques for sonar based time-of-flight camera. The objectives of this project are: Obtain a 2D range Image of an indoor environment/object. Process raw data in order to filter out inconsistencies. Interpolate missing values due to the sensors inability...