The ME-EM Graduate Seminar speaker on Thursday, September 3 at 4:00 in 103 EERC will be Dr. Wangda Zuo from the University of Miami.
The title of his presentation will be ‘Equation-Based Modeling and Simulations for Sustainable Buildings’.
Buildings account for about 41% of energy consumption, 10% of water consumption and 39% of CO2 emission in the U.S. To enable the design and operation of sustainable buildings, building system solutions need to adapt to the local availability of sources and sinks for thermal conditioning, ventilation, lighting, electricity production and water collection, while respecting constraints for occupant health and comfort, building service levels, building system maintainability and aesthetic considerations. As a result, the building becomes an integrated system of multi-physics, multi-scale heterogeneous subsystems. The underlying equations are nonlinear systems of ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations and algebraic equations with continuous and discrete time, as well as control events. Modeling, simulation and analysis of such systems pose new challenges as systems become increasingly integrated. This presentation introduces some of our recent research in developing and applying Modelica-based simulation technology for the design, operation and optimization of sustainable buildings. Modelica is an equation-based object-oriented modeling language for dynamic systems. With the support of US Department of Energy, we developed an open source Modelica Buildings library for building energy and control systems. We will briefly discuss the fundamental challenges in modeling the building systems using the equation-based language. We will also demonstrate the usage of Modelica-based technology in real world research projects. Finally, we will discuss our research initiatives in urban scale simulation.
Dr. Wangda Zuo is an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami. His research focuses on developing and applying innovative physical models and simulation technology for sustainable building systems. He is the Research Committee Chair of International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA) – USA Chapter, Voting Member of American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineering (ASHRAE) Technical Committee 4.7, 4.10 and 7.4. Before joining the University of Miami, Dr. Zuo was a Research Scientist at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dr. Zuo received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University, M.S. in Computational Engineering from the University of Erlangen and Nuremberg in Germany, M. Eng and B.S. in Automation from Chongqing University in China.