 The quality of our built environment depends on the ability of designers to judge, in advance, how their designs will perform when constructed. For individual designers, this judgement comes from training and experience, but the knowledge underlying their judgement often originates from research page links: related links:
This section describes the facilities of the Building Science Laboratory located in Wurster Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. The 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.
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:
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.
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:
The Building Science Laboratory has a unique segmented thermal manikin for studying the energy use, thermal comfort, and environmental control provided by building systems. This manikin measures the interaction between humans and their thermal environment much more accurately than is possible with conventional state-of-the-art instrumentation. The manikin consists of a 4 mm glass fiber-armed polyester shell, wound on the outside with 0.3 mm diameter nickel wire at a maximum spacing of 2 mm. The same nickel wire is used sequentially both for the heating of the manikin and for measuring and controlling the skin temperature, which decreases the manikin's time constant greatly. The manikin is conposed of 16 body parts, which is individually controlled. This ability allows us to use it in non-uniform thermal environments which is significant in evaluating the locally-controlled systems.
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.
We have also made extensive use of a unique instrumented cart in studies of the local environment around human subjects. This cart makes detailed measurements of the physical environment from ankle level to head height (air temperature, globe temperature, radiant temperature asymmetry, humidity, air velocity and turbulence, and illumination), and compiles the data on an onboard laptop computer for later evaluation. It is used in conjunction with another laptop programmed to survey building occupants for their subjective reactions to the environment through interactive menus on its screen. Here too, the data is stored in machine readable form as soon as it is entered.
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.
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