The diversity of CBE’s industry consortium is unique and beneficial to our work, as these perspectives inform the center’s directions and research portfolio. This fall CBE welcomes new leadership who will help to guide the research team and represent the interests of CBE industry consortium members. In this post we talk with the new Partner Chair Andy Reilman and our new Partner Vice-Chair Isabelle Lavedrine.
Biophilia — humans’ innate love of nature — is an idea that has inspired wide-ranging research on the benefits of human connection with nature. So how do we translate this wealth of research knowledge into making buildings that capture the benefits of nature? CBE and SERA Architects are jointly developing a biophilia option for CBE’s occupant survey to evaluate the impact of biophilic features in existing workspaces.
During the 2018 fires, CBE used previously-installed sensors in two University buildings to understand and evaluate building resilience to urban scale air pollution, quantifying particle penetration to the indoors from outdoors. The low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) PM2.5 sensors were accompanied by a survey of the building occupants, with questions focused on changes in their behavior, perceived air quality, self-reported productivity and health symptoms.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of a seminal paper from Rocky Mountain Institute, “Greening the Building and the Bottom Line,” making the case that green buildings’ unique features may improve employee productivity. Since then interest in this topic has remained strong, and several studies by CBE and others have contributed to our collective understanding of workplace productivity; in this post we describe our related work with a focus on key variables.
This spring CBE’s research team received funding to support two new projects that will create new ways to gather, analyze and monetize data from commercial buildings, yielding energy cost savings and more comfort for building users.
CBE has released an interactive web-based tool for the early phases of design of high thermal mass radiant systems, that may be used to predict steady-state conditions for both heating and cooling modes, greatly facilitating a standard design practice. However it can also predict dynamic (transient) performance for cooling, taking into account the effects of changing loads and the effects of thermal mass of the building structure.
CBE has produced a short video to showcase how our research team works with a diverse community of industry leaders to advance new technologies and promising design and operation strategies.
Researchers from CBE and our collaborators from SinBerBEST (a Berkeley-Singapore research collaboration) were awarded all three 2018 Best Paper Awards given by Building and Environment, an international journal that publishes original research related to building science and human interaction with the built environment.
At the 2019 ASHRAE Winter Conference on January 12th-16th, several CBE faculty, researchers, students and alumni will present recent results and demonstrate new design tools. For those of you not able to attend you can view the PDFs in this blog post.
As 2018 comes to a close, here at CBE we can look back on many successes over the year: More industry partners than ever; new tools for practitioners; numerous publications; new funding, scholarships and awards; and welcoming new graduate students, visitors, and post-docs to our team.