Buildings and Their Environment

The activities of the buildings groups are diverse: they range from complex analyses of the performance of equipment in U.S. buildings to estimates of the energy performance of groups of buildings. Other work of the buildings groups includes assessing the effects of building materials and vegetation on both the energy consumption and the air quality in urban areas. On another level, large energy-using appliances have been analyzed, and the energy use of personal computers has been subjected to scrutiny as part of this past year's activities.

Assessment of urban heat islands

Under the leadership of Hashem Akbari, we continue to play a national leadership role in the assessment of urban heat islands and investigating measures to mitigate their effects. This year, an important finding, based on the work of Haider Taha, has been that a program of extensive tree planting and the use of high-albedo materials on the roofs of houses and buildings and in the makeup of roadways could improve air quality in Los Angeles more than removing all automobiles from the road.

Other activities of the heat island project have included research on the albedo of materials-including a database for "cool" materials, an assessment of paving materials, measurements of the performance of roofs made of differing materials, and the contributions to the development of standards for "cool" materials-and measurements of different microclimates.

Energy technologies for buildings

Directing the work on energy technologies for buildings, Joe Huang and colleagues have investigated the design of houses without compressive cooling in moderate California climate zones. Other studies in this area include work on the use of evaporative cooling and other low-energy cooling strategies in large commercial buildings.

Building commissioning

During the past year Mary Ann Piette initiated an active program exploring the issues involved in building commissioning, including the development of computer tools for commissioning commercial buildings. This work has resulted in a collaborative effort with other researchers in both the Buildings Technology and the Indoor Environment programs within the Energy and Environment Division and also with the Information and Computing Science Division.

Energy performance of residential and commercial buildings

Alan Meier and associates have completed an evaluation of the energy performance of residential buildings in the U.S., another in the series of reports produced over the past 15 years within the building energy compilation and analysis (BECA) activities. In the past year other, separate reports have also been completed on the energy performance of personal computers as well as ice-makers in domestic refrigerators.

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