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Lear Innovation Ventures: Driving the Future of Mobile Environments

Innovation is all about answering the question: “What if?” For example, what if we could transfer the latest research for monitoring and controlling building environments to vehicle environments? Questions like this are driving the future of mobility for Lear Innovation Ventures, a new CBE partner focused on accelerating the pace of innovation and collaboration around autonomous, connected, electrified and shared mobility trends.

Berkeley Lab air quality image showing smoke and clean air

Using IoT Sensing to Determine the Resilience of Buildings to Wildfire Pollution

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.

Measuring Workplace Productivity: Key Variables and Future Directions

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.

HOK Central Wolfe Campus

New Partner Red Car Analytics: Solutions to Decarbonize Today’s Buildings

Joining CBE’s industry consortium this spring, Red Car Analytics specializes in building systems advising, performance diagnostics, policy and research, commissioning, and energy modeling. Their mission is to help create an industry feedback loop of effective solutions to decarbonize today’s buildings.

CBE Rad Tool Enables Better Design of High-Mass Radiant Systems

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.

New Technologies Offer Solutions for Understanding Indoor Environments

Companies aspiring to sustainability and wellness have focused on managing workplace indoor environmental quality (IEQ), however undertaking IEQ measurements in a reliable manner can be challenging. In this post we discuss why continuous monitoring technologies are ideal for evaluating building IEQ performance.

CBE Research Collaboration Featured in New Video

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.

Berkeley Researchers Sweep Best Paper Awards

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.