Engineering - Diversity

2013 Project

Cyber-Physical Building Systems

Faculty:    Professor Brandon Hencey

 Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Background

Increasingly smarter devices surround our lives. We have smart phones, cars, electrical grids, and now even our buildings are getting smarter. Why do we want smart buildings? Some want more comfort and convenience. Some want to reduce energy costs. Some want to reduce global warming. What is a smart building? Imagine buildings that actively learn to be more sustainable, more comfortable, and more economical by sensing and reacting to you and the environment. How do we make buildings smart? It is designing better physical devices or better computer code. It requires integrating systems for sensing, computation, and manipulation together into a cyber-physical design.

Purpose

The underlying message in this year's CATALYST Academy is to empower students to use science and math as tools to predict and manipulate our engineered world. This message will be demonstrated by exposure to cyber-physical systems integration via model-based.

The Project

This year's project will feature a hands-on investigation into the design, construction, and operation of smart buildings. In other words, participants will examine the confluence of physical and algorithmic design aspects on building behavior. In the process, students will be exposed to a wide variety of engineering disciplines including: mechanical systems modeling, computer aided design, embedded processors, instrumentation, and electronics.

• First, students specialize in a discipline and they will use building simulations alongside basic building physics lessons to gain insight into improving a baseline building design.
• Second, student teams will form multidisciplinary teams to design and prototype their own smart building design in simulation.
• Last, students will fabricate their designs and compare the simulated building performance with the measured performance.  

The learning outcomes of the CATALYST project include an introduction to model-based design of cyber-physical systems and team problem solving skills. Members from each team will specialize in various aspects of the cyber-physical system design (e.g. cooling, lighting, rule-based control design, etc.). The students will investigate the relationship between a limited set of factors on building design using a customized building energy modeling platform, called Sustain, developed at Cornell University. For example, students can modify orientation, aspect ratio, and window sizes to evaluate their effect on solar heat gain. The students will subsequently integrate their knowledge about each aspect of cyber-physical system to design a building virtual building.

Program Schedule

Down a copy of the CATALYST Academy Program Schedule.