Department of Engineering / News / Improving building efficiency - an important piece of the energy puzzle

Department of Engineering

Improving building efficiency - an important piece of the energy puzzle

Improving building efficiency - an important piece of the energy puzzle

Overlooking the Thames

A Department of Engineering project is among those benefiting from £3 million Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funding.

This project is the perfect setting to move forward past five years of foundational research carried out by the Energy Efficient Cities initiative – particularly in the area of uncertainty analysis and building retrofits.

Dr Ruchi Choudhary

Against a world backdrop of increased concerns about energy security, price fluctuations and, of course, the need to address climate change, six research projects that aim to gain a fuller understanding of how energy is managed in the country’s non-domestic buildings, have been launched.

Funded with £3 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of the Research Councils UK Energy Programme (RCUKEP), the research will address how to use technology, data and information, mathematics, law and sociology to create better energy strategies and behaviours in the public and private non-domestic buildings stock.

Among the schemes being funded is a Cambridge project aimed at creating software that will help to reduce the uncertainty in modelling the energy management of a wide variety of buildings.

Non-domestic buildings such as offices, supermarkets, hospitals and factories account for approximately 18 per cent of UK carbon emissions and 13 per cent of final energy consumption.

By 2050, the total non-domestic floor area in the UK is expected to increase by 35 per cent, while 60 per cent of existing buildings will still be in use. This means that substantial retrofitting is likely and planning what techniques to use to save energy, as well as how to implement change with the cooperation of building occupants, is going to be essential.

Professor Philip Nelson, EPSRC’s Chief Executive, said: “Improving energy efficiency is an important piece of the energy puzzle. Worldwide energy demand is rising, as are global temperatures and sea levels. We need to find smart solutions to how we use energy while improving the environment in which people have to work, rest or play. These projects will go a long way to help improve our understanding of what goes on in non-domestic buildings and add to the armoury at the disposal of those managing these facilities.”

The new projects will be run at Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, University of Southampton and the University of Strathclyde.

The Cambridge project is called B-bem: The Bayesian Building Energy Management Portal.

Managing energy in existing non-domestic buildings is wrought with many challenges, a number of which arguably are due to the diversity found among individual buildings and the humans who occupy them. Buildings are inherently unique systems, making it difficult to generalise technology solutions for any individual property. In 2008, the Energy Efficient Cities initiative commenced a series of projects focusing on developing retrofit analysis tools for UK’s non-domestic building sector. B-bem will bring together the outcomes of these recent projects to develop and recommend an entirely new approach to energy management of buildings with full quantification of uncertainties. The direct outputs of this project will be a series of software tools for three distinct-but-related purposes: (i) collecting building data on relevant uncertainty parameters (i.e., “what do we know now?”); (ii) propagating and quantifying uncertainty using building simulation models, measurements obtained from key monitored building sites and cutting-edge statistical approaches (i.e., Bayesian analysis); and (iii) the display and interpretation of uncertainty.

The research team is led by Dr Ruchi Choudhary of the Structures Group and includes Dr Sebastian Macmillan of the Sustainable Development Group. 

This article originally appeared on the University of Cambridge website.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.