In November 2016, Prof Mae and a group of the Doctoral Students had participated in the Workshop on Energy policy and simulation in Northern California and Japan, at the Univerity Calfornia Berkeley. The visit has also included many interviews and talks with leading firms, organizations, and personals in the field of Sustainable design and policies. In addition, There were great tours to highly efficient buildings and to two to Autodesk showrooms. The Workshop Key speakers were: Mindy F. Craig (Blue Point Planning), Olivier Brouard (SOM), David Goldstein (NRDC), Eleanor Lee (LBNL), Konstantinos Papamichael (UC Davis), Stefano Schiavon (UC Berkeley), Brendon Levitt(LOISOS + UBBELOHDE), Santosh Philip (L+ U).

In September 2015, a group of MaeLab visit to the US for two main objectives, one is to witness the Solar Decathlon competition, and secondly to survey and interview some of the UC Berkeley scholars about the early Stage optimization tools. This post shares the Solar Decathlon visit experiences. The solar decathlon is An award competition for US student teams to build an energy efficient homes. In 2015 competition, there were 14 universities competing, each of which is designed for its home climate,  and targeting their selected client, and the award went to STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. We have interviewed the people in charge, entered and surveyed with basic environmental tools and all the 14 projects, please enjoy the photo tour below…

(introduction will be added soon)

The Survey was in May 2015,  and it was a joint activity with the University of California Berkeley visiting group. The survey was for daylight and thermal environment of a building at Kanagawa Institute of Technology (KAIT). The surveyed building is a unique workshop that stands for its open plan, glass facade, and agile appearance. It was designed by Junya Ishigami in 2007, with the concept of having an internal space that mimics the forest and blends with the ambient environment. This concept was achieved by having a fully glazed envelope at all sides and having a scattered structural system that imitates trees. The building is daylit through several strips of glazed skylights. Hence, it was so interesting to survey the daylight patterns and comfort in such one-of-a-kind spaces. Besides, it was interesting to investigate the implications of having such exposure, plus the single glazed and steel construction on the thermal environment. We have found that the building is mostly over lit and users (students) had to adjust the working conditions by adding fabrics to attenuate the daylight either on the skylights or in the glazed curtain walls. The thermal environment and AC basic measurements, aided with subsequent simulations, showed that the building, due to its unprotected and light envelope follows the external environmental conditions. i.e. its temperature starts rising the moment sun shines on it and drops immediately with the sunset. Hence, this building exhausts a tremendous amount of energy in order keeping it at comfort levels.

Okinawa is the southmost part of Japan, and it is the hottest region that experiences severe storms as well. With the advent of concrete, these climatic conditions had led the typical roofing system to change gradually from a tiled roof into concrete flat roofs. Such flat concrete roofs absorb much higher solar radiation compared to the conventional tiled roof. One of the means to modulate the solar gain in such cases is to use solar paints as final finishing or use ventilated tiles that are painted with solar paint. During the lab visit to Okinawa in 2014, we met Prof Tsutsumi, form the local university,  The University of Ryukyus who have started looking at solar paints implementation on the concrete flat roof. We took some thermal photos that show big differences between the typical finishes and solar paint finishes, and there was even some shows remarkable variation between the different solar paint brands.