Research

The goal of this research is to create new paradigms for the resilient design of urban communities, and uniquely tailored toward the design of coastal cities, thus contributing to NSF's science and engineering mission. By bringing together an interdisciplinary set of collaborators from engineering, architecture, and social sciences, this research...

Led by Dr. Zuo, this is a joint research project with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Schneider Electric. We have 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...

The goal of this project is to develop a new planning framework for smart, connected and sustainable communities that allows meeting such zero energy, zero outage, and zero congestions goals by optimally deciding on how, when, and where to deploy or upgrade a community's infrastructure. By bringing together interdisciplinary domain...

The SBS lab is working with School of Architecture, Center of Computaitional Science to create ZenCiti, a “smart city” expected to revolutionize the IT world with its integration of technology into everyday life. The project will be built next to the Yucatán Science and Technology Park (YSTP). The SBS Lab...

The objective of this research is to reconcile the differences between the empirical and modeled baselines for energy performance comparison for new and existing commercial buildings, allowing seamless translation of building energy performance metrics among LEED, Standard 90.1, Standard 189.1, Standard 100, and the bEQ As Designed and In Operation...

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...

Powerful computational capabilities have always been sought after by those working in fields that require vast amount of calculations to be done in a relatively short amount of time and a low cost. To meet this needs, we are conducting research in performing high performance building simulation using multi-core CPU...

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...

This research is to create a coupled simulation of indoor environment, envelope, HVAC and control systems to support the controls design and evaluation of energy efficient ventilation. The fast fluid dynamics (FFD) model is adopted to model the indoor environment with stratified air distribution. The Modelica Buildings library is used...