A center dedicated to partnering with industry in the development, demonstration, evaluation, and deployment of new technologies and analysis

tools for high performance buildings.

Center for High Performance Buildings

Center for High Performance Buildings, Ray W. Herrick Laboratories, Purdue University

177 S. Russell Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2099

Phone: +1-765-494 2132., Email: chpb@purdue.edu, Website: https://engineering.purdue.edu/CHPB

Center for High Performance Buildings

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Overview

The Center for High Performance Buildings (CHPB) at the Ray W. Herrick Laboratories was established in 2013 through a construction grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Its mission is to partner with industry to develop, demonstrate, and evaluate new technologies and analysis tools that can enable dramatic improvements in the performance of buildings in terms of energy, environmental impact, and occupant satisfaction and productivity. The CHPB is a multi-disciplinary effort involving researchers from Mechanical, Architectural, Electrical, and Computer Engineering and Psychological Sciences. The team has the expertise and unique facilities to consider a wide range of applications related to engineered environments that address numerous important issues in indoor environmental quality, human comfort and productivity, comfort delivery systems, building envelopes, lighting, equipment efficiency and reliability, environmental impact, controls, automation, etc. The team can span the spectrum from fundamental research to technology development to technology evaluation to technical assistance covering the thrust areas depicted in the adjacent figure and employing a variety of unique, state-of-the-art testbeds that include:

1. Fully-instrumented living laboratory offices that have reconfigurable facades, comfort delivery, and primary equipment to allow testing for impacts of new building technologies on energy and human performance indices and to generate data needed for model validations;

2. Perception-based engineering (PBE) facility to study combined impacts of lighting, acoustics, air quality, vibration, temperature, humidity and air flow on occupant perceptions and performance in a controlled manner;

3. Laboratory-scale facilities to allow controlled testing of building envelopes, lighting/façade

automation, air distribution, cooling/heating equipment, heat exchangers, compressors; The building has a LEED-Gold classification, but the primary goal in the design was to have a facility that will allow research on technologies that go well beyond LEED.

CHPB Research

Areas

Center for High Performance Buildings

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Reconfigurable Living Laboratories

4 nearly identical office spaces, each housing 20 graduate

students

Reconfigurable to enable direct comparisons of

alternative technologies for windows, lighting, comfort

delivery, controls and acoustic treatments

Comfort delivery options include air supply from ceiling,

floor or side-wall diffusers along with radiant floor

heating and radiant chilled beam cooling

Double fades with different options for ventilation and

energy recovery

Well-instrumented and separate primary equipment for

each LL to allow direct energy comparisons

Occupant studies (comfort, annoyance, productivity) can

allow full operational assessments of new building

technologies

Evaluation of promising new technology in a real-world

setting

Center for High Performance Buildings

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Perception-Based Engineering Laboratory The Perception-Based Engineering (PBE) Laboratory enables occupant response testing under controlled conditions in a facility that is highly reconfigurable. Lighting, acoustics, vibration, air quality, temperature, humidity and visual stimuli can be manipulated to examine individual and combined effects. The room can be configured to simulate building environments to conduct fundamental stimulus-perception research as well as to examine how stimuli levels influence comfort and performance. The south facing façade is reconfigurable in order to study effects of natural daylighting on occupant satisfaction/performance. It houses a six degree-of-freedom shaker and a high-resolution motion capture system. This facility can enable the development of a better understanding and models for the impacts of all indoor variables on human comfort and productivity.

Center for High Performance Buildings

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HVAC&R Equipment Facilities A wide variety of facilities exist for testing HVAC&R equipment under controlled systems, including two pairs of psychrometric chambers, a compressor calorimeter, a variety of small-scale compressor test stands, a wind tunnel for testing heat exchangers under normal and fouled conditions, geothermal heat exchange, centrifugal chiller for fault testing, an ice storage test facility, etc.

The two pairs of psychrometric chambers allow testing of primary heating and cooling equipment up to 10 tons from temperatures of -20 to 125 F and over a broad range of humidity conditions. An active desiccant dehumidification system is employed to improve moisture removal at low ambient temperatures.

The heat exchanger facility allows controlled testing of evaporators, condensers, cooling coils, or heating coils over a range of capacities up to around 10 tons. A dust injector allows evaluation of the impacts of fouling on performance.

The geothermal field consists of 16 vertical U-tube heat exchangers with bores of 300 feet deep. The heat exchangers are instrumented to allow determination of ground heat transfer. One of the bores is instrumented with temperature sensors along its length to allow detailed model validation. Ground heat exchanger flow rates and inlet temperatures can be continuously varied to enable testing of advance control strategies. There is an opportunity to add up to 8 bore holes for evaluation of new ground-source heat exchanger technologies.

Indoor Air Quality Facility The indoor air quality chamber allows study of the impact of air distribution on indoor environmental conditions, including air temperature, humidity, velocity, and contaminant concentration. The facility consists of two well-insulated chambers to simulate an indoor space adjacent to an ambient condition. The indoor room is reconfigurable to allow air supply from ceiling, wall, or under-floor diffusers. It is also reconfigurable to allow consideration of different types of indoor environments, such as offices, classrooms, industrial workspaces, air craft passenger areas, etc. The indoor chamber is equipped with a particle image velocimetry (PIV) system to enable visualization of the flow field. Measurement arrays of thermocouples, hot-wire anemometers, humidity sensors, and gas sampling tubes connected to a gas chromatograph allow detailed 3-dimensional characterizations.

Center for High Performance Buildings

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Architectural Engineering Labs The architectural engineering labs consist of several room-scale test spaces to study the combined impact of envelope/facade systems, lighting and thermal systems and controls on energy and comfort. The facilities include side-by-side test offices (with reconfigurable façade, glazing, curtain wall, shading, lighting, mixed-mode cooling, radiant cooling systems) and flexible, customized controls for each component. The spaces are fully instrumented with indoor and outdoor temperature, illuminance, solar radiation, air velocity and humidity sensors, a weather station, power meters and imaging photometer camera systems. Except for comparative testing of technologies under real weather conditions, the facilities are used for accurate and realistic assessment of building design and control options on energy use, indoor conditions and comfort indices, and prototyping of new predictive control algorithms and new building technologies. Moreover, the facilities are used to develop and study renewable energy technologies, such as photovoltaic-thermal systems and solar collectors (solar heating and cooling).

Center for High Performance Buildings

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Faculty

James E. Braun Director of the Center for High Performance Buildings

Herrick Professor of Engineering jbraun@purdue.edu, (765) 494-9157

Modeling, analysis, and optimization with applications to: Intelligent Controls, Automated Diagnostics,

Component & System Improvements, and Building Simulation Tools

Stuart Bolton Professor of Mechanical Engineering bolton@purdue.edu, (765) 49-42139

Noise Control, Sound Absorbing Materials and Systems, Sound Propagation and Transmission, Source

Characterization, and Sound Field Visualization and Simulation

Brandon Boor Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering

bboor@purdue.edu, (765) 496-0576

Indoor & urban air pollution, human exposure assessment, aerosol science, bioaerosols, airborne nanoparticles, low-cost air quality monitoring, health effects of air pollution

Qingyan Chen

Vincent P. Reilly Professor of Mechanical Engineering yanchen@purdue.edu, (765) 496-7562

CFD for air flow in & around buildings with applications to: Indoor Air Quality, Homeland Security, Energy

Analysis

George Chiu Professor of Mechanical Engineering gchiu@purdue.edu, (765) 494-2688

Dynamic Systems and Control, Mechatronics, Embedded Systems and Real-Time Control

Patricia Davies

Professor of Mechanical Engineering Director, Ray W. Herrick Laboratories daviesp@purdue.edu, (765) 49-49274

Impacts of Noise on People: Annoyance, Speech Interference, Sleep Disturbance;

Sound Quality and Sound Perception. System Identification and Signal Processing.

Center for High Performance Buildings

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Eckhard A. Groll Reilly Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Director, Office of Professional Practice groll@purdue.edu, (765) 496-2201

Experiments and modeling with applications to: Alternative Refrigeration Technologies, Natural Refrigerants,

and Component & System Performance

W. Travis Horton Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering

wthorton@purdue.edu, (765) 494-6098

Ground-Coupled Heat Pumps, Building Energy Performance Analysis

Jianghai Hu Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering

jianghai@purdue.edu, (765) 496-2395

Neera Jain Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering

neerajain@purdue.edu, (765) 496-0436

Dynamic modeling and optimal control applied to building systems and equipment

Panagiota Karava Associate Professor of Civil Engineering pkarava@purdue.edu, (765) 494-4573

Human-Building Interactions, Personalized Controls, Self-tuned Environments,

Buildings Systems Modeling and Identification, Model-Predictive Control, Building-Integrated Solar Energy Systems

Robert Proctor

Distinguished Professor, Cognitive proctor@psych.purdue.edu, (765) 494-0784

Human Performance, Human Factors and Human-Computer Interaction, and Experimental Research Methods

Ming Qu

Associate Professor of Civil Engineering mqu@purdue.edu, (765) 494-9125

Solar Energy Systems, Intelligent Controls, Absorption Systems

Thanos Tzempelikos

Associate Professor of Civil Engineering ttzempel@purdue.edu, (765) 496-7586

Building Envelope, Lighting and Daylighting, Dynamic Facades, Thermal and Visual Comfort, Building

Simulation and Energy Modeling

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Past Projects

Optimal Design of Building Systems

Old-Flooded Vapor Compression A/C Systems for Hot Climates

Model Predictive Control for Buildings with Mixed-Mode Cooling

Performance of Heat Exchangers and Heat Sinks after Air-Side Fouling and Cleaning

Secondary Loop Air Conditioner for Residential Application Using Propane

Cold Climate Heat Pump using Vapor Injected Compression

Heat Pump System with Liquid Flooded Compression

Visual Comfort Assessment in Spaces with Smart Façade Controls

Development of shading and lighting control algorithms

Commercial Building Retrofit Assessments

Optimization Methodology for Energy-Efficient Housing

Air Cycle Heat Pumps for Industrial Applications

Investigation of Methods to Reduce the Effects of Mal-distribution on Evaporator Performance

Development and Assessment of Heuristic Control Strategies for a Multi-Zone Commercial Building

Employing a Direct Expansion System

Distributed Model Predictive Control for Building HVAC Systems

Development of Plug-and-Play Optimal Control Algorithms for Small Commercial Buildings

Analysis of a Rotating Spool Expander for Organic Rankine Cycles in Heat Recovery Applications

Design and Test Organic Rankine Cycle with a Scroll Expander

Increasing Net Work Output of Organic Rankine Cycles for Low-Grade Waste-Heat Recovery

Liquid Flooded Ericsson Power Cycle

Econometric Modeling and Optimization of CHP Operations of the Wade Power Plant

Waste Heat Recovery Options in Large Gas-Turbine Combined Power Plants

Optimizing the Control of Free Cooling and Energy Storage Options at Purdue

High COP Heat Pumps for Commercial Energy Applications

Low-Cost Virtual Power and Capacity Meter for Rooftop Units

RTU Economizer Diagnostics using Bayesian Classification

Virtual Sensor-Based RTU FDD for Multiple Simultaneous Fault Diagnoses

Methodology for Evaluating Performance of Diagnostics for Air-Conditioners

Mechanistic Modeling of a Dual-Unit Variable-Speed Ductless Heat Pump System

Inverse Modeling to Simulate Fault Impacts for Air Conditioning Equipment

Inverse Heat Pump Modeling

Integration of Humans and their Environment in Building Design and Operation

System Identification and Model-Predictive Control of Office Buildings with Integrated Photovoltaic-

Thermal Collectors, Radiant Floor Heating and Active Thermal Storage

Integration of Occupant Interactions with Window Blinds on Model Predictive Control of Mixed-Mode

Buildings

Plug-and-Play Cyber-Physical Systems to Enable Intelligent Buildings

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2016 CHPB Sponsored Projects

Development of Self‐Tuned Indoor Environments

Investigation of Chemical Looping for High Efficiency Heat Pumping

Development of General Purpose Simulation Tools for Positive Displacement Compressors

Evaluating the Benefits across the U.S. of Variable-Speed Equipment for Packaged Rooftop Units (RTUs)

Optimizing Seasonal Cooling and Heating Performance of Unitary Heat Pumps using Variable Speed Compressors and Fans

A Sequential Approach for Achieving Separate Sensible and Latent Cooling

High Performance, Multi-Functional Building Envelopes Integrated with Lighting and Thermal Systems operation

Assessment of Alternative Technologies for Sustainable Housing Developments

An Inverse Modeling Toolbox for Buildings

Further Development of Fast Fluid Dynamics for Indoor Air Quality and Thermal Comfort Study and Control

Development of a Simulation Model Predicting Efficiency Gains for Residential Appliances Utilizing Thermal Integration

National/Regional Assessments of Demand Response Potential in Small Commercial Buildings

Automation and Demonstration of an RTU Coordinator in Small/Medium-sized Commercial Buildings

2016 Industry Members