News

Buildings account for approximately 36% of the United States’ total carbon emissions and building retrofits have great potential to reduce carbon emissions. As a part of a comprehensive research project funded by US National Science Foundation, the Science Foundation Ireland, and the Department for the Economy in Northern Ireland, our...

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...

It is crucial for buildings to be resilient to unforeseen challenges, such as providing safe indoor environment during the COVID-19 pandemic, while ensuring sustainability for long-term operation. This paper investigates the effectiveness of various strategies to improve indoor air quality during the COVID-19 pandemic for a prototype office building located...

Dr. Zuo, gave a Distinguished Lecture at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In this presentation he introduced our recent research in developing and applying the next generation multi-scale modeling technology for the optimal design and operation of smart, sustainable, and resilient cities. He also...

Ph.D. student, Cary Faulkner, recorded two presentations for the ISHVAC 2021 Virtual Conference on Healthy, Smart and Interactive Built Environment. These presentations were titled A Novel Physics-informed Algorithm for Training AI Models to Predict Indoor Airflow and MERV 13 Filtration for Office Buildings During COVID-19 Pandemic . Additionally, he received...

Bank of Indonesia has recently provided additional financial support to our Smart Garden Alley project. The new funding will be used for purchasing new equipment and conducting technical trainings. Special thanks goes to Bank of Indonesia for their generous contribution. Led by Dr. Zuo, our project Modernizing Cities via Smart...

SBS Lab hosted its first in-person seminar in 20 months. A big thank you to Dr. Dru Crawley for giving this exciting talk on GOING DIGITAL – MODELING INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE FOR SYSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENET and holding a Q&A session with the attendees. It is now possible to quickly model a...

Ph.D. student, Chengnan Shi , received the generous $1,000 USD travel grant from the ASHRAE Student Activities Committee to travel to the Winter Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada in February 2022. Chengnan, as the recipient of the travel grant will be exposed to many activities such as seminars and technical...

Face-to-face surveys with residents and management team of Garden Alley are progressing as planned. This is an effort of our NSF project Modernizing Cities via Smart Garden Alleys with Application in Makassar City . The local surveys are crucial to our project since they can bring insights directly from local...

Does reducing building energy consumption have the same effects on reducing CO 2 in the era of high renewable energy penetration? Our recent paper with current and former Ph.D. students, Yingli Lou , Yunyang Ye , Yizhi Yang and Jing Wang , finds that although reducing total building energy consumption...