Category: Energy and Carbon

A tiny house for seasonal rangers was designed for the extreme climate and diurnal temperature fluctuations of Joshua Tree National Park. The challenging climate conditions resulted in an extensive investigation of the building envelope to act as a passive thermal storage system to naturally cool and heat the house. The north wall was designed as … Continue reading TINY HOUSE IN THE DESERT: A study in indoor comfort using moveable insulation and thermal storage

This research mainly provided methods to compare the performance of visual, energy, and thermal categories, and methods to put them into one scoring system to evaluate the comprehensive performance with the consideration of trade-offs. Performance of several shading and glazing options were evaluated. The results indicated that for either a small room with small window … Continue reading Dynamic Shading and Glazing Technologies: Improve Energy, Visual, and Thermal Performance

Reducing lighting electricity consumption while maintaining an acceptable illuminance level is critical to achieving environmental sustainability and net-zero energy buildings. Lighting control systems have become widely adopted in commercial buildings, aiming to automatically adjust the electrical lighting levels depending on daylight penetration. Two simulation-based daylight-linked lighting control algorithms (switch on/off and dimming control) have been … Continue reading Simulation-Based Lighting Control Algorithm: Integrating Daylight and Lighting Simulation for Daylight-Linked Lighting Control

Areas in redlined neighborhoods associated with very low tree canopy cover are hotter than their greener and wealthier counterparts in Brentwood and Los Feliz. Hotter surroundings include high outdoor heat stress due to exposure to direct shortwave radiation and increased building cooling loads, which impact the health and wellbeing of residents. The heat mitigation due … Continue reading Microclimate and Building Energy Performance

The current BIM-based PV system design process largely depends on transferring the architectural model to the PV special simulation software. However, some critical geometric information is lost during this process, and it is a one-way process with no information flow back. Furthermore, the current process takes time and effort on remodeling and transforming data between … Continue reading Streamlining Sustainable Design in Building Information Modeling: BIM-based PV Design and Analysis Tools

The research focuses on the interior daylight environment analysis with kinetic façades in terms of daylight metrics by using parametric workflow. The process of parametric simulation can detect and investigate the existing advantages and deficiencies with respect to the daylight index. By processing simulation data, the workflow uses model-based predictive control as a control algorithm … Continue reading The intelligent control strategy of kinetic façades for daylight and energy performance: evaluating the daylight effect of adaptive systems based on parametric workflow

The severe housing shortage for the seasonal rangers at Joshua Tree National Park can be resolved by providing housing that is modular and has a rapid production process. This housing can be made more sustainable by designing units that are fully self-supporting by creating a high-performance building enclosure that can regulate the thermal performance of … Continue reading A High-Performance SuperWall: Designed for a small residence at Joshua Tree National Park

A unique building in downtown Los Angeles has been selected as a testbed for various hypothetical studies of facade replacement strategies, for energy and carbon control. The main objective of this study is to analyze the energy performance of an existing building, retrofit its facade, consider CO2 emissions, energy consumption, and enhance environmental sustainability. Embodied … Continue reading A Proposal for Building Envelope Retrofit on the Bonaventure Hotel: A Case Study Examining Energy and Carbon