The Building Science Lab is now among the largest of such university laboratories in the world, with first-rate facilities for measuring and predicting the performance of buildings and their occupants’ responses. The major fixed facilities include controlled environment chamber (designed to resemble a contemporary office while allowing precise control over the levels of temperature, humidity, ventilation and lighting in the space), a full-scale underfloor air test facility, a boundary-layer wind tunnel, and a sky simulator.
CBE’s environmental test chamber is a key research asset.
Additional experimental facilities include instrumented “thermal mannequins” and two mobile environmental measurement carts. Each of these facilities has extensive instrumentation and data acquisition equipment. The Laboratory also has an extensive set of mobile and wireless measuring equipment for conducting field studies within operating buildings, and for micro-meteorological investigations outdoors.
Affiliated departments possess extensive experimental facilities, including Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Public Health, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). These facilities are available to CBE through the participating faculty and researchers from their respective departments.