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School of Architecture

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College of Design

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PHPP2E+: Employing dynamic building simulation while pursuing passive house certification

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-12-15) Leite Goncalves, Vitor

The building sector alone accounts for around 40% of the global GHG emissions, and aiming to decrease this percentage, various organizations are trying to address the energy load of buildings. European Passive Houses are characterized mainly by construction concepts that can greatly reduce the overall energy usage. During the Passive House certification process, modelers must utilize the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP), a steady-state monthly energy balance tool provided by the Passivhaus Institut (PHI) to verify the performance of the building according to the certification criteria, but nowadays due to climate change and the improvement of hourly dynamic simulations, more detailed analysis of the thermal processes within and around the building are also desired by many practitioners to better understand the indoor environment during the design process. The aim of this thesis is to 1) create a framework to facilitate the conversion of inputs of the PHPP into EnergyPlus, allowing for an easy and quick method of utilizing hourly dynamic building simulations and performing a more detailed analysis while pursuing Passive House certification; 2) investigate the difference in the results reported by the PHPP and by commonly utilized dynamic simulations tools, such as EnergyPlus, and 3) examine how different airflow modeling approaches in dynamic building simulation, such as the standalone BEM, Airflow Network Model (AFN), or Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can affect the results of the simulation results in terms of overheating in Passive Houses. All dynamic simulations will be evaluated using Honeybee as a front-end interface for EnergyPlus, while relying on Rhino3D’s Grasshopper integration to facilitate the input translation between the PHPP and EnergyPlus.
An Application for Urban Analytics

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-12) Steinichen, Charlotte Jane

The objective of this research was to develop a new, data-based methodology for analyzing urban environments. By combining graph-based street network data with socioeconomic data scraped from open sources such as Google Places and Foursquare, the application designed for this study provides a quantitative understanding of the urban landscape surrounding stadium projects. The application has been shown to be flexible and can be applied to urban environments across the globe. As a result, this study is a promising first step towards a comprehensive, data-based urban model that can be used to assist place-making professionals both in understanding existing urban development and in siting new projects.
Shape Machine: shape embedding and rewriting in visual design

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-07-27) Hong, Tzu-Chieh Kurt

Shape grammar interpreters have been studied for more than forty years addressing several areas of design research including architectural, engineering, and product design. At the core of all these implementations, the operation of embedding – the ability of a shape grammar interpreter to search for subshapes in a geometry model even if they are not explicitly encoded in the database of the system – resists a general solution. It is suggested here that beyond a seemingly long list of technological hurdles, the implementation of shape embedding, that is, the implementation of the mathematical concept of the “part relation” between two shapes, or equivalently, between two drawings, or between a shape and a design, is the single major obstacle to take on. This research identifies five challenges underlying the implementation of shape embedding and shape grammar interpreters at large: 1) complex entanglement of the calculations required for shape embedding and a shape grammar interpreter at large, with those required by a CAD system for modeling and modifying geometry; 2) accumulated errors caused by the modeling processes of CAD systems; 3) accumulated errors caused by the complex calculations required for the derivation of affine, and mostly, perspectival transformations; 4) limited support for indeterminate shape embedding; 5) low performance of the current shape embedding algorithms for models consisting of a large number of shapes. The dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive engineering solution to all these five challenges above. More specifically, the five contributions of the dissertation are: 1) a new architecture to separate the calculations required for the shape embedding and replacement (appropriately called here Shape Machine) vs. the calculations required by a CAD system for the selection, instantiation, transformation, and combination of shapes in CAD modeling; 2) a new modeling calibration system to ensure the effective translation of geometrical types of shapes to their maximal representations without cumulative calculating errors; 3) a new dual-mode system of the derivation of transformations for shape embedding, including a geometric approach next to the known algebraic one, to implement the shape embedding relation under the full spectrum of linear transformations without the accumulated errors caused by the current algorithms; 4) a new multi-step mechanism that resolves all cases of indeterminate embeddings for shapes having fewer registration points than those required for a shape embedding under a particular type of transformation; and 5) a new data representation for hyperplane intersections, the registration point signature, to allow for the effective calculation of shape embeddings for complex drawings consisting of a large number of shapes. All modules are integrated into a common computational framework to test the model for a particular type of shapes – the shapes consisting of lines in the Euclidean plane in the algebra U12.
A FORMALIZED URBAN PROSUMER MODEL: SUPPORT OF AUTOMATED SIMULATION AND DESIGN OPTIMIZATION

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-07-26) Jung, Yun Joon

Many global cities have announced ambitious net-zero energy consumption targets or net-zero CO2 emissions plans. It is well recognized that this can only be realized through a mix of measures such as efficiency improvements at the sites of consumption and decentralized energy generation, storage and delivery mechanisms. This transition will not happen without major changes to energy supply networks, especially in the way they enable frictionless inclusion of renewable energy sources and local supply, for instance through microgrids. At the urban scale, buildings constitute the major consumers of electricity and their integration through building-to-building and building-to-grid controls is crucial to realize efficient energy sharing in urban energy networks. Over the last decade, the building energy simulation domain has moved its focus from traditional local studies to urban energy studies. The main objective of this thesis is to make a contribution to this growing research domain, especially in enabling the simulation of energy supply networks in a robust manner and at a large scale. It is possible to simulate such networks with customized software but considering that there is no systematic way to specify urban energy models (especially with multiple concurrent control topologies), the simulation software has to be hand-customized which leads to opaque simulations that moreover are hard to use for rapid variant explorations. The thesis argues that this can be overcome by the development of an urban prosumer (UP) schema that facilitates the specification and automated mapping of an urban energy network into simulations, focusing on the effective specification of controls outside the software. At a high level, the UP schema is comprised of a physical and a logical layer. The physical layer conceptualizes existing urban energy networks using directed graphs for energy transport between nodes. The logical layer conceptualizes how the dynamic processing (reasoning) of sensor data leads to instructions to a set of actuators that execute the control. In doing so, two levels of control are distinguished: (a) “private” (mostly rule-based) control such as the internal HVAC system following temperature setpoints, (b) “public” control that is exposed to the rest of the network and thus within the scope of the UP schema. Public control can be either rule-based or optimal control, the latter driven by an appropriate optimality criterion, defined at a network scale. In design situations, the optimality criterion is not limited to control variables but can also include design parameters, such as building design parameters, solar installation sizes, community battery size, and the number of EV charging stations. Mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) is used to solve optimal control problems. The genetic algorithm is employed to solve design optimization problems. The case studies using the UP schema for ten Georgia Tech campus buildings are presented. The purpose of the case studies is to prove that the UP schema can facilitate simulations involving different levels of controls. The simulations target optimal energy decisions for the selected campus buildings in the presence of PV and electricity battery. Additionally, three residential buildings in California are chosen to investigate how the design and control parameters act together to avoid the power outage situation with the embedded UP schema in the simulation platform.
Addressing Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) Data Needs: A Case Study in a Low Resource Community

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-07-26) Heidelberger, Erin

Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) is a method of simulating the energy usage of a grouping of buildings, at the scale of a neighborhood or city, rather than the typical simulation of a single building. This can be a powerful tool to reduce current energy usage, through testing retrofit scenarios on the existing building stock, and to guide future planning efforts. This switch in simulation scales is crucial to move towards more sustainable and resilient cities. This thesis addresses data availability issues to inform UBEM studies, in all urban contexts, by establishing a list of readily available data sources as well as a multi-step, theoretical framework that can be used to gather the data required to run an accurate UBEM that considers the surrounding socioeconomic factors. This framework is demonstrated through a case study in the Grove Park neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia. 110 single-family households were modeled. The results of the study analyze current energy use patterns, compare neighborhood-specific archetype definitions to default residential archetype templates, and investigate the neighborhood’s performance under future weather scenarios. The study shows that within a single neighborhood the energy use intensity (EUI) can vary by up to 92 kWh/m2 based on building envelope condition and occupancy patterns. Default archetype inputs can dramatically underestimate or overestimate the energy use of households in a low resource community. Investigating energy performance under both current and future weather scenarios allows for energy efficiency strategies that are beneficial to the neighborhood now while increasing future resiliency.
Jobs Justice Climate: Redevelopment Proposals for North Dekalb Mall and The Gallery at South Dekalb

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-06-21) Dunham-Jones, Ellen ; Jassu, Joel ; Alfali, Hala ; Barnum, Chris ; Heidelberger, Erin ; Kama, Prerana ; Goncalves, Vitor ; Nanda, Sakshi ; Patel, Harini ; Pham, Quynh ; Raytchev, Luben ; Rudder, Jennie Lynn ; Yu, Zhexin (Josie) ; Zhao, Haungzhe

Hypothetical redevelopment and reinhabitation urban design proposals are presented for both shopping malls to help the local DeKalb County Commissioners and their constituents envision and discuss options of what change might look like guided by Green New Deal goals.
IMPACT OF ELA CALIBRATION METHODS ON BUILDING ENERGY MODEL FIDELITY AND FITNESS

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-05-05) Althobaiti, Mohanned Mutlaq M.

As building performance is increasingly improved and building energy consumption decreases, a greater percentage of the total energy loss of a building occurs through envelope leakage. This leakage is characterized by the effective leakage area or ELA, which is a proxy parameter to what is essentially a complex flow phenomenon through cracks driven by pressure differences. Moreover, different façades and façade parts have different ELA and are typically subjected to different pressure differences in a given wind condition. This poses major challenges to building energy models. Current building performance simulation (BPS) uses software modules that approximately calculate envelope infiltration, but the literature shows that their calibration and validation is still unsatisfactory. In fact, calibration and validation of BPS models is still an important subject of study in our quest to improve the fidelity of simulation-based predictions in various applications. The high level of interaction and subsumption between parameters can result in a model that approximates the measurements well (and thus meets the ASHRAE auditing threshold) but whose “best estimates” of parameters are unreliable. This can be a problem in performance contracting when limits have been agreed on certain parameters such as ELA and U-value. It can also be problematic in the use of the model for certain performance assessments. This thesis exemplifies the underlying issues by comparing the results of direct and indirect calibration at different fidelities. The study focuses on the calibration of building energy models of existing buildings. It does so by conducting calibration for different experiments, i.e., for different sources of data, and for different model fidelities. The calibration is anchored around ELA and its impact on “best estimates” of other parameters is verified. The study is done with explicit quantification of uncertainties in the experiments as well as in model parameters. The two major experiments considered are (a) direct ELA calibration through tracer gas experiments, (b) indirect ELA calibration with consumption data enhanced by spot temperature measurements. Two case studies on existing buildings are performed. The thesis develops a new framework to address calibration and validation for different combinations of data and model fidelity, where each combination leads to probability distributions of the calibration parameter set. For each combination the ultimate aim is to determine the fitness of the resulting building energy model for given application studies such as building energy benchmarking, fault detection, unmet hour verification, etc. This requires the introduction of a novel fitness measure that determines the confidence level of a particular calibrated model for decisions in a predefined building performance assessment scenario. The thesis shows an early example of how to develop and quantify fitness. The results will be meaningful for better understanding façade infiltration, better understanding of the limits of calibrated models, and the way this translates into fitness of the resulting model. The thesis focuses exclusively on existing buildings, but its findings may lead to large scale data sets of calibrated ELA values in existing buildings, that may find their way into better ELA quantification in energy models of new designs.
Divergence in Architectural Research

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02-15) Dortdivanlioglu, Hayri ; Marratt, Marisabel

The essays in this volume have come together under the theme “Divergence in Architectural Research” and present a snapshot of Ph.D. research being conducted in over thirty architectural research institutions, representing fourteen countries around the world. These essays also provide a window into the presentations and discussions that took place March 5-6, 2020, during the ConCave Ph.D. Symposium “Divergence in Architectural Research,” under the auspices of the School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, Georgia. On a preliminary reading, the essays respond to the call of divergence by doing just that; they present the great diversity of research topics, methodologies, and practices currently found under the umbrella of “architectural research.” They inform inquiry within architectural programs and across disciplinary concentrations, and also point to the ways that the academy, research methodologies, and the design profession are evolving and encroaching upon one another, with the unspoken hope of encouraging new relationships, reconfiguring previous assumptions about the discipline, and interweaving research and practice.
Terminology and Geometry: Evolution of Chinese Traditional Architectural Drawing

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Sun, Lina

Chinese traditional architectural drawing possessed a unique set of terminologies and geometric principles that were entirely distinguished from the Western Euclidean geometry, under the category of tu (the Chinese character for drawing). This paper etymologically and geometrically investigates the evolution of Chinese traditional drawing, from around the Tang (618-907 CE) and Song (960-1279 CE) Dynasties to the early modern period in the twentieth century. The etymology analysis centers on the terms di pan, shi and yang. The geometrical analysis deconstructs the composition of a selected drawing in the Yang Shi Lei tu archives in the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912 CE). By doing so, this research reveals that the terminologies corresponding to different geometrical forms respectively indicate associations between architectural drawing and the philosophy of Chinese cosmology, and the arrangement of the geometrical forms in the visual picture plane facilitates expressions of the concepts of space and position in geometrical cosmology. Moreover, the architectural tu itself as an entity situating in between the technical tu tradition and painting tradition, developed architecturalization of pictorial languages.
Postcolonial Possibilities of Architectural History: Questions and Concerns in Reading the Urbanisms of the Global South

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-02) Dasgupta, Soumya

As the twenty-first century unfolds before us, the megacities of Global South experience unprecedented urbanization characterized by informalizations of urban spaces. While several new theoretical perspectives from fields such as geography, sociology, and urban planning are contributing heavily in understanding and explaining these mega-urbanisms of the Global South and their complicated and contested narratives, Architectural History, as a discipline, still struggles to articulate these transformations meaningfully. In the context of this epistemological dichotomy, this paper delves into an academic multilogue between architectural history as a methodological apparatus to read and understand space, recent theoretical insights from related built-environment disciplines that reflect on the Global South, and critical theories that help us understand socio-spatial processes, productions, and practices. In doing so, this paper first critiques the role of architectural history in its inability to include much of the spatial narratives of the Global South and questions the canonical understandings of architecture that most of its present academic pedagogy perpetuates. Second, it discusses the potentials of how and what architectural history and theory can learn from contemporary discourses in neighboring subjects. Third, it calls for a postcolonial intervention into architectural history and theory to enunciate the spatial narratives of the understudied Global South. Further, by configuring a critical conversation between theoretical perspectives such as Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’, Lefebvre’s triad of spatial productions, Certeau’s ‘strategies and tactics,’ Bayat’s ‘quiet encroachment,’ and Harvey’s ‘insurgent architect’ this paper proposes an analytical framework that might help us read the complex, entangled, and contested urbanisms of the Global South and the history of their architectural productions.