Energy Systems And Management In Buildings

Urban environments consume significant amounts of energy, mainly from fossil fuels, and are highly sensitive to pollution from power generation systems due to high population density in these areas. As a result, energy systems that are both efficient and clean are necessary to support these growing urban settings. Research within this area will focus on developing sustainable buildings and efficient energy systems by proposing three subprojects. The Building-Wide Energy Usage and Management subproject will create new strategies and technologies to efficiently heat and cool buildings with minimal waste through advanced full-building modeling and sub-scaled testing. The Energy Storage subproject will improve methods to store excess energy generated for buildings in inexpensive large-scale flow batteries and hydrogen, leveraging the existing and largest university hydrogen fueling facility at Cal State LA. The Energy Production subproject will investigate efficient building-applied photovoltaics (BAPV), biogas generation and cost-effective burners (designed and tested at Cal State LA) that can directly utilize minimally treated biogas in large residential buildings.