Renovating the Present to Build a Greener Future

Renovating the Present to Build a Greener Future More than half of the buildings which will be in use in 2050 have already been built. Green Building Council (USGBC). However, the USGBC then asked for a less expert tool that could enable architects, developers and others to obtain quick quotations of how green roof design decisions might impact building energy use. Some monitoring tools include moisture sensors in walls, heat flux monitoring, site weather, sub-metered electricity use for all major circuits, monitoring of window usage, wall temperature sensors, infiltration testing and sensors for indoor air temperature, humidity and CO2. "We are just at the point where we have started to collect data," Moody says. In fact, a great deal of questions GBRL seeks to answer focus around how to build better modeling techniques to predict effects. Industry partners can contact the lab straight from their website to start a collaboration to design, conduct and analyze experiments or field campaigns. Another important part of the GBRL is short-term equipment rental. " All equipment is free to students who propose an experiment or idea, while other people and companies can rent for a low cost. The equipment for both laboratory and field use falls under five main categories: (1) infrared instruments, for envelope thermal performance and moisture assessments; (2) indoor environmental quality measurement and datalogging capabilities; (3) computational resources for building energy, internal/external CFD and urban climate modeling; (4) energy performance measurements and logging for equipment and buildings; and, (5) fundamental thermal property characterization of building materials. Furthermore to renting equipment and using the equipment in the lab, GBRL also offers classes which are targeted toward the building sciences to its students. While architecture is housed in the art department, engineering belongs to the science group. An internal question the laboratory has been studying revolves around green roofs and solar panels and how they interact with the building, as well as the outside environment. In 2007, David Sailor of GBRL and his colleagues developed a Green Roof Energy Calculator for the U. "It provides a place for architecture and engineering students to work together in teams and collaborate on projects, classwork or laboratory experiments," Moody says. That has become one of the most important parts of how our lab is functioning, and what it brings to our university. The collaboration motif is evident throughout most projects the laboratory facilitates. The new windows are quick to install and relatively cheap. "Our goals are to more clearly understand the interactions between the built environment and the greater urban climate," says Seth Moody, GBRL Lab Manager. To do that, GBRL studies questions about both the interior and exterior of buildings—from urban ecology, to green systems, to heat islands, to composite structures that make up the skin of a building. After some collaboration with the Univ. GBRL now has all its instrumentation in place and is set to extensively model and monitor. And that's exactly what the Green Building Research Laboratory (GBRL) at Portland State Univ. With several large grants from the NSF and the U. Department of Energy (DOE), the GBRL takes researchers from Oregon and beyond to work in close collaboration with industry, academia and government to solve the fundamental and applied research needs of the green building industry. According to Moody, data logging, temperature, humidity and light sensors are among the most popular rental equipment as many are interested in how well their buildings are performing. of Toronto and Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, the team was able to develop the online Green Roof Energy Calculator. And this is the direction Moody sees the future of green building headed. "I see the future in retrofit," he concludes. Once those systems are integrated, retrofit is where it is going to begin to pick up. We have a lot of work to do to get older buildings up to high-efficiency standards. Another example of an outside project—and one that aligns with the future of green building, according to Moody—is retrofitting newer windows to older houses. GBRL was able to complete a characterization of the thermal properties of the windows to make sure a good energy rating. Their first version was an energy balance simulation module for representing green roofs in whole building energy simulation software—something that took quite a bit of modeling expertise to understand. Renovating the Present to Build a Greener Future Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 04/04/2012