Machine learning-based predicted mean vote modeling for mine worker well-being

The problem of the “sick” building-facts and implications: Identifying and measuring indoor nonbiologic agents

Necessity of the Adaptive Comfort Standard for the Middle East in the Times of Rising Energy Use

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) conducted a final quantitative analysis to assess whether buildings constructed according to the requirements of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)/Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) Standard 90.1-2010 (ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010, Standard 90.1-2010, or 2010 edition) would result in energy savings compared with buildings constructed to ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007(ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007, Standard 90.1-2007, or 2007 edition). The final analysis considered each of the 109 addenda to ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007 that were included in ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010. All 109 addenda processed by ASHRAE in the creation of Standard 90.1-2010 from Standard 90.1-2007 were reviewed by DOE, and their combined impact on a suite of 16 building prototype models in 15 ASHRAE climate zones was considered. Most addenda were deemed to have little quantifiable impact on building efficiency for the purpose of DOE's final determination. However, out of the 109 addenda, 34 were preliminarily determined to have a measureable and quantifiable impact. A suite of 240 computer energy simulations for building prototypes complying with ASHRAE 90.1-2007 was developed. These prototypes were then modified in accordance with these 34 addenda to create a second suite of corresponding building simulations reflecting the same buildings compliant with Standard 90.1-2010. The building simulations were conducted using the DOE EnergyPlus building simulation software. The resulting energy use from the complete suite of 480 simulation runs was then converted to energy use intensity (EUI, or energy use per unit floor area) metrics (Site EUI, Primary EUI, and energy cost intensity [ECI]) results for each simulation. For each edition of the standard, these EUIs were then aggregated to a national basis for each prototype using weighting factors based on construction floor area developed for each of the 15 U.S. climate zones using commercial construction data. When compared, the resulting weighted EUIs indicated that each of the 16 building prototypes used less energy under Standard 90.1-2010 than under Standard 90.1-2007 on a national basis when considering site energy, primary energy, or energy cost. The EUIs were also aggregated across building types to a national commercial building basis using the same weighting data. On a national basis, the final quantitative analysis estimated a floor-space-weighted national average reduction in new building energy consumption of 18.2 percent for source energy and 18.5 percent when considering site energy. An 18.2 percent savings in energy cost, based on national average commercial energy costs for electricity and natural gas, was also estimated.

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) is an international organisation of more than 55 000 members with chapters throughout the world. ASHRAE develops standards that “set uniform methods of testing and rating equipment and establish accepted practices for the HVAC&R (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration) industry worldwide, such as the design of energy efficient buildings” (www.ashrae.org). ASHRAE then submits its standards to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for endorsement as an American standard. Furthermore, ASHRAE standards are also adopted by several other international standards setting organisations as their own national standards, giving ASHRAE a reach well beyond the USA. The tobacco industry, for the past 20 years, has been heavily involved with ASHRAE in an attempt to influence …

Many of our current recommendations for moisture and condensation control are not based on quantitative analysis under a consistent set of design assumptions, even though a growing number of computer tools are beginning to make such analysis practical. To address this issue, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) published ASHRAE Standard 160, “Criteria for Moisture-Control Design Analysis in Buildings,” in January 2009. The standard provides performance-based procedures and criteria for moisture design analysis for buildings. It sets criteria for moisture design loads, moisture analysis methods, and satisfactory building performance. The standard can be used for the design analysis of the building envelope or to help guide specifications for HVAC equipment and controls. Eventually, it should form the basis for prescriptive moisture design rules based on a uniform set of design assumptions and loads. It is intended to help reduce building failures in service, provide consistency in design approach and recommendations, offer more flexibility in design for moisture control and better ability to incorporate new materials, and provide greater transparency by requiring reporting of design assumptions. This paper describes the rationale behind this standard, what is in it, its potential uses, and areas of uncertainties. A standing ASHRAE Standard Project Committee has now been formed to update the standard. The paper discusses some of the main changes that are likely to occur in the next update.

This paper outlines the changing role of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) in shaping thermal comfort research during the second half of the 20th century. During that time, the comfort research community grew considerably, while ASHRAE’s role became smaller. Yet, it remained vital. ASHRAE engineers established the basic comfort research methods and ASHRAE funding supported subsequent scientific advances fundamental to the two principal comfort models, the Predicted Mean Vote index and the Adaptive Thermal Comfort model. The Society’s changing role highlights how a multi-disciplinary approach was embedded in comfort research, how industrial and academic ties shaped inquiry, how opposing viewpoints were addressed within the research community, and how the network of comfort researchers expanded from the Unites States to Europe, Australia, and Asia.

ASHRAE TC-2.6 Sound and Vibration Control technical committee has been activity involved with development, refinement, and promotion of Indoor Sound Criteria. ASHRAE, its members, and those in the HVAC industry are the largest users of Indoor Sound Criteria. As part of an effort to educate engineers and others particularly in the building design industry, an unofficial introduction to ASHRAE viewpoints and guidelines on Indoor Sound Criteria were developed into a presentation. Suggested use of dBA, NC, RC, NCB, and RC Mk II criteria descriptors have been included. The use of sound criteria in the Design, Commissioning, and Troubleshooting or Diagnostics of background sound or noise due to HVAC systems were considered. Criteria descriptors that promote the awareness of Sound Quality have been an essential aspect of ASHRAE research. One aspect of the ASHRAE criteria descriptor has been to provide suggested means to determine and quantify Noise Induced Vibration (NIV) of building systems. This type of noise problem has been well identified by the use of RC Mk II, RC, and NCB sound criteria methodology. Actual examples of NIV will be described in the presentation.

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), working through a Task Force appointed from Technical Committee 6.7, Solar Energy Applications, has completed and is now ready to distribute Proposed Standard 93-P, Method of Testing for Rating Solar Collectors Based on Thermal Performance. This document is based on an earlier draft prepared in 1974 by J. E. Hill and Tamami Kusuda of the National Bureau of Standards for the National Science Foundation which then was the Federal agency responsible for solar energy research. The Hill-Kusuda proposal was carefully reviewed by competent groups drawn from ASME, ASHRAE and the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) and a number of changes were made by the authors before their proposed test procedure was published in December, 1974 as NBSIR 74-635. This proposal has already been used widely and specifications are being written requiring that it be followed in testing collectors that are being offered for sale to government agencies. However, NBSIR 74-635 is not an officially adopted standard and it will undoubtedly be superceded by ASHRAE Proposed Standard 93-P which is the subject of the following paper. 93-P, prepared by a group of specialists drawn from universities, government agencies, private testing laboratories, manufacturers and users, provides for outdoor testing under the sun and indoor testing using a solar simulator. It also covers methods of determining collector time constants and incident angle modifiers. It is equally appropriate for use with concentrating and with flat plate collectors. It is anticipated that the new Standard will be issued early next year, following the usual review procedure, bearing the identifying number 93-77 to designate that it is the 93rd ASHRAE Standard and that its year of adoption is 1977.© (1977) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

The steps to develop the building energy use intensity targets for American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Standard 100, Energy Efficiency in Existing Buildings are outlined in this report. The analyses were conducted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in collaboration with the ASHRAE Standard 100 committee and Dr. Alexander Zhivov, the subcommittee chair responsible for targets development.

This paper presents the extent of ASHRAE’s involvement in sound and noise standards. ASHRAE has only a limited number of formal standards in acoustics but its two volumes of the four-volume set of handbooks contain many items that have become de facto standards. The ‘‘Fundamentals Handbook’’ and the ‘‘Applications Handbook’’ provide tables that show the power loss due to end reflection, attenuation of lined ducts, room criteria approaches and metrics, and other material properties that are used even though, and in spite of the fact that, they never were evaluated as a standard by Canvass or other means. I will summarize the topics in the ASHRAE publications and discuss the limitations and current controversial topics.

The United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) conducted a preliminary quantitative analysis to assess whether buildings constructed according to the requirements of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)/Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) Standard 90.1-2010 (ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010, Standard 90.1-2010, or 2010 edition) would result in energy savings compared with buildings constructed to ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007(ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007, Standard 90.1-2007, or 2007 edition). The preliminary analysis considered each of the 109 addenda to ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2007 that were included in ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010. All 109 addenda processed by ASHRAE in the creation of Standard 90.1-2010 from Standard 90.1-2007 were reviewed by DOE, and their combined impact on a suite of 16 building prototype models in 15 ASHRAE climate zones was considered. Most addenda were deemed to have little quantifiable impact on building efficiency for the purpose of DOE’s preliminary determination. However, out of the 109 addenda, 34 were preliminarily determined to have measureable and quantifiable impact.

The United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) conducted a final quantitative analysis to assess whether buildings constructed according to the requirements of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)/Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) Standard 90.1-2007 would result in energy savings compared with buildings constructed to ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2004. The final analysis considered each of the 44 addenda to ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2004 that were included in ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007. All 44 addenda processed by ASHRAE in the creation of Standard 90.1-2007 from Standard 90.1-2004 were reviewed by DOE, and their combined impact on a suite of 15 building prototype models in 15 ASHRAE climate zones was considered. Most addenda were deemed to have little quantifiable impact on building efficiency for the purpose of DOE’s final determination. However, out of the 44 addenda, 9 were preliminarily determined to have measureable and quantifiable impact.

In this article, we consider a data-driven approach for fault detection and isolation (FDI) of chillers in HVAC systems. To diagnose the faults of interest in the chiller, we employ multiway dynamic principal component analysis (MPCA), multiway partial least squares (MPLS), and support vector machines (SVMs). The simulation of a chiller under various fault conditions is conducted using a standard chiller simulator from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). We validated our FDI scheme using experimental data obtained from different types of chiller faults.

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is one of the utmost concerns when it comes to the health and comfort of the occupants within a structure. However, because of the lack of information with regards to IAQ, especially in the Philippines setting, improvements with respect to the IAQ are not prioritized. Hence, the goal of this study is to determine if the indoor air quality in the Northwest and Southwest buildings of Mapua University is up to standard set by American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) and Occupational Safety and Health (OSH). The study was divided into two phases, one focused on the quantitative walkthrough to evaluate IAQ. This was achieved by using an integrated instrument system using thermohygrometers for temperature and relative humidity, Telaire 7001 for CO2 concentration, and SKC IOM Sampler for particulate matter. Results show that in some rooms, temperature exceeded the range for thermal comfort and majority of the rooms does not comply with the ASHRAE standard for CO2 concentration and the particulate matter remained in the same zone in all of the rooms. The second phase of the study focused on the development of predictive models based on the results of the quantitative walkthrough from the first phase. The predictive models were used to predict the ideal number of occupants in a room given the IAQ parameters. Model performance showed that stochastic gradient boosting (gbm) and support vector machine with Radial Basis Function Kernel (svmRadial) are the best performing models with R2 and RMSE of 0.6838, 0.7777 and 0.812, 0.804 respectively.

Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems constitute the largest portion of energy consumption equipment in residential and commercial facilities. Real-time health monitoring and fault diagnosis is essential for reliable and uninterrupted operation of these systems. Existing fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) schemes for HVAC systems are only suitable for a single operating mode with small numbers of faults, and most of the schemes are systemspecific. A generic real-time FDD scheme, applicable to all possible operating conditions, can significantly reduce HVAC equipment downtime, thus improving the efficiency of building energy management systems. This paper presents a FDD methodology for faults in centrifugal chillers. The FDD scheme compares the diagnostic performance of three data-driven techniques, namely support vector machines (SVM), principal component analysis (PCA), and partial least squares (PLS). In addition, a nominal model of a chiller that can predict system response under new operating conditions is developed using PLS. We used the benchmark data on a 90-ton real centrifugal chiller test equipment, provided by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), to demonstrate and validate our proposed diagnostic procedure. The database consists of data from sixty four monitored variables under nominal and eight fault conditions of different severities at twenty seven operating modes.