Associate Professor Jin Wen, PhD recently received a U.S. Department of Energy Building University Innovators and Leaders Development (BUILD) award to promote university-industry partnerships to enhance building efficiency. Drexel is one of three universities to receive this award to help American universities establish stronger partnerships with industry and business in the area of building efficiency. Georgia Institute of Technology and The University of California, Davis are also recipients of this funding. Each university will be awarded $200,000. Wen and her research group will work to develop an innovative and cost-effective automated fault detection and diagnostics tool that integrates statistical process control, machine learning, and rule-based methods to reduce building energy consumption. Wen will be working with a team including Drexel engineering graduate and undergraduate students, students from Drexel’s Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship, and industry partner KGS Buildings.
On average, between 20% and 30% of commercial building energy consumption is wasted as a result of faults within a building’s mechanical and control systems. Existing automated fault detection diagnosis (AFDD) tools focus on diagnosing faults within components of a building’s system rather than a comprehensive diagnosis of the whole system and/or whole building. These existing AFDD tools also have limited universal applicability and usability as well as high implementation costs. The proposed objective is to develop a new set of AFDD tools that are cost effective, accurate, and compatible to VOLTTRON, which is an open software platform that allows for decentralized cooperative decision making within commercial energy infrastructure, resulting in an integrated yet streamlined approach for building interactions with the energy grid.
Wen’s research group will use Drexel’s Stratton Building as the test-bed for these applications. The mechanical system in Stratton represents typical commercial building mechanical systems therefore the energy data output is not specialized thus will yield data that identifies with a majority of commercial buildings. A significant amount this project work will come from an undergraduate team consisting of one engineering student, one information systems student, and one business student. The final deliverable will be a comprehensive package of data, analysis, and a commercialization program for an AFDD toolkit that provides a thorough overview of faults within a building’s entire energy system. Demonstration tools related to this project will be put online as educational material for specific architectural engineering classes. More information about this award can be found on the Department of Energy’s website and on the DrexelNow news site.