Improving Energy Efficiency
You may not think of the office you work in or the condo you live in as being as visible a part of the greenhouse gas equation as the traffic clogging the street outside. But in reality, keeping those buildings in the human comfort-zone is indeed a big hog on the energy grid. In the United States, close to 80% of all electricity generated is used for keeping buildings in a livable condition. That adds up to half of all of the country' carbon emissions; so small savings here would rapidly add up. But that energy use is surprisingly dumb when problems arise – something that the team wants to change radically, for larger commercial buildings.
They plan to do so by building intelligence into their heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems – using automated 'fault detection and diagnosis' technologies. The idea is that this technology helps to rapidly pinpoint, and so halt, problems that can cause needless energy waste. Until now, such waste can go unnoticed for years. But fitting expensive monitoring equipment into the 5 million-plus commercial buildings in the US would be a massive financial hurdle – which is where this proposal hopes to shine.
The team has developed a set of virtual meters, to measure the water and air flows in a complex heating and ventilation. Critically, these don't need a total reworking of the already-installed equipment. By hooking into existing sensors, and using clever computer algorithms, their approach allows a sophisticated monitoring system to be set-up for a relatively low-cost. Such intelligent buildings could help transform flabby air-con systems into lean green HVAC machines.
About the finalists:
Li Song, Ph.D., P.E. has been an Assistant Professor at the School of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma since August 2009. The School is one of seven schools within the College of Engineering. Her major research topics are related to energy efficiency improvement, optimization and fault detection in building mechanical systems. Prior to this appointment, she worked at Building Energy Solution & Technology (Bes-Tech) Inc. as a technology director for two years, after which time she was promoted to Vice President of Engineering Technology in 2007. She conducted more than 100 building audits and implemented advanced building energy technologies to achieve energy savings and enhance building energy performance through her industrial practices and has published 20 technical papers in the past six years in refereed journals or peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
Gang Wang, Ph.D., P.E. is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Architectural Engineering at TAMUK. Prior to joining TAMUK, he was a Research Associate Professor at the Energy Systems Laboratory (ESL) of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 2000 to 2008. He supervised Ph.D. students at the ESL to complete five government projects sponsored by the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), totaling $1M. Since 2003, he has published eight refereed journal articles and 26 peer-reviewed proceedings papers. His research areas are modeling, analysis, control, optimization, and fault detection and diagnosis of building energy systems.