Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
The state of California is proposing the use of a toolkit a Texas A&M professor of architecture helped develop to accurately determine energy savings after a building retrofit.
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers’ Inverse Modeling Toolkit was developed in 2002 by Jeff Haberl, associate director of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station’s Energy Systems Laboratory, along with David Claridge, the ESL’s deputy director, and J. Kelly Kissock of the University of Dayton.
“The most straightforward way to measure energy savings is to simply compare pre- and post-retrofit energy use,” said the report Haberl and his colleagues wrote describing the toolkit. “This method implicitly assumes that the change in energy consumption between the pre-retrofit and post-retrofit periods is caused solely by the retrofit.”
The toolkit provides a more accurate picture of post-retrofit energy savings by accounting for weather conditions, occupancy, internal loads and building operating procedures, all of which may change between the pre- and post-retrofit periods.
It uses an inverse model, a term used in the building energy community to describe models derived from measured energy use.
Haberl is a fellow in the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). His research interests include heating, ventilating, and air conditioning design, energy conservation savings measurement techniques, meter and monitoring equipment and calibrated energy simulations.
His academic interests also include building energy data visualization, online diagnostics for HVAC equipment, solar energy heating and cooling systems, solar energy measurements, code compliance calculations and emissions reductions calculations.
The ESL focuses on energy-related research, energy efficiency, and emissions reduction, and has a total annual income for external research and testing exceeding $4.5 million.
- Posted: July 13, 2009 -
