EFRI-SEED: Creating Opportunities for Adaptation Based on Population in Urban Landscape for Sustainable Built Environment (PULSE)

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The objective of this EFRI-SEED award is to develop an urban simulation platform to identify and test opportunities for urban dwellers to better adapt to indoor and outdoor environmental conditions and for the aging building infrastructure to better adapt to changing environmental conditions and new building energy performance requirements. This research will make contributions that could potentially help address one of the Grand Challenges for Engineering defined by the National Academy of Engineering as "Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure." Also, the urban infrastructure is the main focus of the recently approved Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Neighborhood Development Rating System (LEED-ND), which will be represented in the project from a quantitative analysis perspective. Developed simulation tools and techniques will provide a framework to integrate architects and engineers for solving complex coupled problems in a novel way to decrease building energy consumption and environmental impacts. Policy makers will have access to quantitative data to improve assessment of energy demands in urban environments. Such capacity can provide a fundamental framework for responsible energy policy and growth of urban settlements. The work will provide better understanding of environmental stressors that can lead to systemic population health problems. The project results will provide policy makers with baseline information necessary to upgrade urban infrastructure for improved population health. Direct dissemination of the Virtual PULSE simulation tool will be aimed for the industry and research community, while special materials will be developed for undergraduate/graduate students and campus communities. The project will include multi-scale modeling with overall system boundaries spanning across a whole urban neighborhood to capture the combined effect of multiple buildings on energy flows for cooling/heating/lighting, while maintaining a model resolution small enough to simulate these effects based on first principles (conservation laws directly applied to multiple scales). The energy flow modeling efforts will be coupled with research outcomes on occupant comfort and health ranging from mucosal irritation and lower respiratory symptoms to occupant alertness. The main campuses at the University of Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University will serve as case studies for this project to develop urban design performance metrics related to building energy use and occupant satisfaction with the urban environment. These metrics will support the development of improved building energy control strategies by taking full benefits of sun, wind and rain at the neighborhood scale, as well as accounting for inputs from occupants. The developed software, including interfaces, will be available in open software architecture. The research team plans to enable a community infrastructure, where researchers can provide vital input into the Virtual PULSE model for improved neighborhood simulations and data collection.