| Building Science Laboratory |
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Center for Environmental Design Research The Building Science Laboratory is operated in partnership with the University of California Energy Institute in order to serve the entire University of California system. The Laboratory is an international center for the study of the built environment, with research projects ranging in scale from regional climate to the microenvironment of the human occupant. It allows students, faculty, architects, and engineers to use scientific and engineering approaches to learn about and improve the quality of buildings. The Laboratory's research activities are administered by the Center for Environmental Design Research, with projects funded by a wide range of sources in industry, government, scientific foundations, and professional societies. The Laboratory is also heavily used for classroom demonstrations and teaching exercises associated with building science courses. Field Equipment The Building Science Laboratory has portable equipment for acquiring and analyzing data from experiments in the field as well as in the laboratory. This equipment includes instruments to determine the energy and ventilative efficiencies of buildings and their mechanical systems (such as infrared thermographs, heat flux meters, flow metering hoods, tracer gas systems, flow visualization systems, and Watt-hour meters); portable instrumentation for measuring the detailed thermal and luminous characteristics of building interiors (thermometry, low-speed anemometry, and sensors for humidity and the various types of radiation), four portable weather stations for measuring exterior microclimates and wind fields, devices to measure the transmissivity of window systems, vegetation, and porous materials; and devices to compare the sun's yearly motions with the obstructions of the site surroundings. The field research makes extensive use of small programmable data loggers, and is supported by a comprehensive computer system back at the Laboratory. Sky Simulator The use of physical models for analyzing daylight in buildings and for predicting potential lighting energy savings is well established in research and design education. The Lab works with both Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and Pacific Gas and Electric's Pacific Energy Center (PEC) in developing and maintaining facilities for this purpose. The Sky Simulator or artificial sky in Wurster Hall was developed by LBL with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. It uses an array of dimmable interior lights to simulate a range of outdoor sky and sun conditions for testing architectural scale models. It has been used extensively to test new design concepts and to validate new computer programs for daylighting simulation. The Lab offers access to a large heliodon with a collimated beam used for shading studies; with another at the PEC in San Francisco. The PEC heliodon features a miniature point-of-view video camera that feeds images to videotape or to a computer equipped for digital frame capture. These facilities allow designers to make both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of daylight in their proposed building designs. Other uses of the facility include research on the performance of architectural devices to control daylighting, glare, and solar heat gain; sunlight availability studies for public open spaces; and validating newly-developed computer models for predicting interior illumination. Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel The Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel simulates the natural wind over models of the built environment in order to predict wind effects at full scale. Depending on the application, these models can be typical architectural working models or specially built for wind tunnel testing. To produce a reliable simulation, a combination of flow conditioning devices in the upwind portion of the tunnel creates a 'boundary layer' of varying speed and turbulence appropriate to the terrain around the proposed building. The resulting patterns of wind flow around the model are made visible with smoke, bubbles, and drifting particles, and wind speeds, turbulence, and pressures are measured with a variety of electronic sensors. Data acquisition and analysis are automated through a dedicated PC workstation. The facility is used both by researchers and by students in the course of developing their design projects. The wind tunnel is used to study a wide range of design, planning, and engineering problems including:
Controlled Environment Chamber The thermal and luminous environments in buildings strongly influence the comfort and productivity of their occupants. The Controlled Environment Chamber is designed to resemble a contemporary office while allowing precise control over the levels of temperature, humidity, ventilation, and lighting in the space. By closely resembling a real room, the Chamber reduces psychological effects associated with 'test cell' experiments of human comfort. The Controlled Environment Chamber is used to investigate a wide range of physical and psychological aspects of thermal comfort in indoor environments. Topics of special interest have been:localized 'task conditioning' systems that are controlled by the occupant, the influence of higher rates of air movement on comfort in warm conditions, and the effects of humidity on comfort. In addition to thermal comfort, the Chamber has been used to study ventilation and temperature distributions in rooms, including the influence of interior furnishings and partitions on interior air movement and air quality. These topics are important to passive solar and naturally ventilated building design as well as to 'high-tech' commercial building design. |