Carlos Duarte

Carlos Duarte is an assistant professional researcher at the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley. His research interest includes radiant heating and cooling, occupant behavior impact on building energy consumption, and the development of tools that help various building stakeholders. He is currently working on a project aimed to standardize semantic descriptions of equipment, control points, and locations along their relationships to make it easier to extract actionable information from the wealth of data that buildings’ systems produce. He will also contribute to a project aimed to reduce natural gas consumption in commercial building heating systems.

Carlos received his PhD in Architecture from the BSTS program at UC Berkeley in Summer 2020. He received his BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Idaho in 2011 and 2013, respectively. During his MS studies, he worked for the Integrated Design Lab in Boise, Idaho, on projects that ranged from measurement and verification, development of calibrated whole-building energy models from existing buildings, and residential and commercial field studies. During his PhD studies, he helped develop a benchmark model for the Singaporean high-rise building stock. However, he focused on the investigation of high thermal mass radiant systems (HTMR). He studied this system’s impact on the cooling load, cooling capacity, and controls. He analyzed the potential of chiller-less designs by coupling HTMR with evaporative cooling towers and helped developed design tools to reduce the barriers for the widespread implementation of these systems.