What if every year airplanes consumed
almost half of this country's energy
resources? What if it were cars or
mass transit? You might be surprised to
know that almost half of this country's
energy is being spent on something that
doesn't move at all.
Buildings use up to forty percent of our non-reusable power.
>> Menassa: Buildings have historically been among
the highest energy consumers up to
forty percent of the total energy
generated in the U.S.
Ninety-two percent of that energy comes from burning fossil
fuels, coal and natural gas, etc. What my
lab is looking at is understanding not
only how the building systems work but
we are more interested in how people
influence this energy use.
A simple example would be people leaving their
offices in the evening and the lights
are on. Once we determine this
information then we look at how we can
influence people to change their
behavior or modify some actions whenever possible.
[music]
Right now most of these
simulation models, they assume occupants
to be static. It's assuming everybody is
going to be there at the same time.
That everybody is trying to be using the building
in the same way. We know that this is not true.
We developed our own simulation so
this is using something called
agent-based modeling that allows you to
develop the simulation environment where
you can give people unique
characteristics. We're trying to work on
making the agent-based model that we
have communicate directly with existing
energy simulation models to allow more
inputs or more information that support
the analysis for energy use.
[shuffling of boxes]
Typically, the approach to collect this
data is probably you go and
instrument the building with sensors. If this
is a building that you're going to
retrofit it means instrumenting it
heavily right now to collect all this
data is going to be very expensive so
what we are doing is we are trying to
use robots to do this instead of having
each room instrumented now you have only
the robot collect this data for you
throughout different periods of time.
We call them "turtle-bots", they're like
short robots. They basically have a
laptop on them and this is the laptop
that's connected to the different sensors.
For us to be able to determine the
location of the robot and where it needs
to go next, we put markers along the
walls in the building and that would
tell the robot where it is so it will
localize it and that will also tell us
where the data was collected as well.
The other project which I think is also very
very cool is we have a phone application
that allows us to collect human
physiological data from things like
smartwatches.This includes heart rate,
skin temperature, activity level, sleep
patterns and this allows us to provide
them with more personalized settings for
their spaces. We're interested in using
this type of models for tighter spaces
like, for example, in airplanes,
automobiles, trains. How can you ensure
the comfort of people in these small
spaces?
My main interest or motivation is seeing people being able to be happy
in their spaces; complaining less about how
cold or warm they feel in that
particular space, achieving comfort and
energy conservation.