News

On September 28th, Dr. Zuo and Ph.D. student Yizhi attended a web-meeting with Mr. Mohammad Ramdhan Pomanto, Mayor of Makassar City, Indonesia, to discuss the latest updates of our Smart Garden Alleys project. Dr. Zuo introduced the major technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), which...

SBS Lab member, Jing Wang , successfully defended her PhD dissertation on “Occupant-centric Modeling and Control for Low-carbon and Resilient Communities”. This dissertation aims to address a series of challenges surrounding low-carbon and resilient communities. Currently, very few tools are available for community-scale dynamic modeling and control-based studies and building...

The load scheduling of resilient communities in the islanded mode is subject to many uncertainties such as weather forecast errors and occupant behavior. In this paper, we investigated how occupants’ thermal preference would affect the optimal load scheduling performance in resilient communities. We adopted Monte Carlo simulations and chance constraints...

Dr. Zuo has been elected as a Fellow of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA) in 2021. This honor has been given to members of the association who have attained distinction in the field of building performance simulation. Dr. Zuo has spent nearly 20 years in the building modeling...

Net-Zero Energy Communities (NZECs) are critical to assuring the sustainability and resilience of modernized power systems. In this paper, we present an open-source NZEC virtual testbed in Modelica based on a real NZEC in Florida, USA. A case study was also conducted where a building-to-grid integration control is evaluated where...

As the new academic year approaches, students at CU Boulder elected new officers for the ASHRAE CU Boulder Student Branch. According to the votes, PhD students, Saranya Anbarasu , Cary Faulkner and Nasim Mamaghani will serve as President, Vice-President, and Secretary/Treasurer, respectively, in academic year 2021-22. Prior to this, other...

PhD student, Cary Faulkner, presented his research on "Physics-based Building System Modeling for Evaluation of Building Performance and Control" at a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) lunchtime webinar. In this presentation, he described the need for high-fidelity, physics-based building system models to evaluate advanced building control and showed three cases...

CU Boulder has recently received $750,000 award from National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the industry-focused Center for Building Energy Smart Technologies (BEST). BEST will bring together universities and industries to transform the building industry through an integrated systems approach to design, retrofit, construct, and operate sustainable buildings and cities...

A 3-year international collaborative research project among SBS Lab at University of Colorado Boulder, University College Dublin and Ulster University has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ireland Science Foundation, and the Northern Ireland Department for the Economy, which adds up to about $1.2 million dollars. This...

Chiller plants comprise more than half of the power consumption in commercial buildings and therefore any effort in improving their performance contributes significantly to the total energy savings. To address the needs of the building performance analysis community and as a part of a comprehensive research project funded by ASHRAE,...