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UNITED TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION

Retrofitting the existing building stock represents the largest and fastest way to reduce energy consumption for the Department of Defense (DoD); however, the current retrofit delivery process is manually intensive and expensive, focused on equipment selection for initial cost and not energy performance, and not amenable to systems solutions that have the potential for substantially reducing energy consumption in buildings. Existing modeling and simulation tools used for design cannot accurately capture the dynamic coupling among building subsystems, especially as it relates to control, and therefore represent a barrier to robust and scalable deployment of technologies that require low levels of energy consumption. The scope of low energy consumption building technologies that can be considered for retrofit range from envelope concepts (such as shading and thermal storage devices) to novel equipment (such as geothermal heat pumps and radiant heating and cooling systems), and include supervisory control systems to robustly manage the operation of these integrated system architectures. The objective of this project is to develop the required systems methodology, building physics, and dynamics-based analysis tool set to design and deliver significantly higher energy performance in existing buildings than is achievable by the current retrofit process. The methodology consists of tools for rapid survey, audit, retrofit option analysis, and selection to ensure robust design and operation of buildings. In the first phase of this project, researchers will segment the existing DoD building stock. In-depth analysis of targeted case studies as well as experimentation and data gathering at representative DoD sites will be used to establish energy performance baselines and to isolate and quantify the coupling among subsystems and the associated sources of uncertainty. This phase will result in the development of a methodology for analyzing building energy performance. The second phase of the project will involve conducting system studies to deliver an energy efficient retrofit design specification. A set of analysis tools will be used to evaluate low energy consumption solutions, accomplished via passive modifications, low energy consumption HVAC systems, and/or new supervisory control methods. This will involve dynamic simulation of system-level building models and computational techniques for uncertainty and sensitivity analysis and optimization of energy efficient retrofit system designs. System-level models will be used to optimize the design of natural thermal and airflow dynamics and then to apply low-energy level control schemes to stabilize system performance. This approach will enable exploitation of the interconnections among building subsystems and improve overall energy efficiency.Use of this methodology and associated tools to design building systems with energy efficiency gains of 50% or more is projected to be applicable to major retrofits of medium- to large-sized buildings, representing a nominal portion of the DoD building stock. Once these designs are piloted and demonstrated at DoD sites and the process and tool set is standardized for broader dissemination, impact on the larger building stock is anticipated. A 50% reduction in energy utilization across all DoD facilities would yield $1.75 billion in energy cost savings.

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