The Carleton Building Performance Research Centre (BPRC) seeks to advance the state of the art in building and community design and operations for low energy and greenhouse gas emissions, while improving comfort and usability. We are a group of six professors across Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Carleton and approximately forty undergraduate and graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Our graduate students are enrolled in the following programs, though this is flexible: Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Sustainable Energy Engineering and Policy. Key topics of interest include:
– experimental, simulation, and in situ approaches to studying residential and commercial buildings, campuses, and communities
– building envelopes
– advanced adaptive controls
– renewable energy systems
– energy storage and distribution systems
– data analytics, mining, and visualization
– building design and optimization
Key research facilities: CHEeR, Solar Energy Systems Laboratory, the Human Building Interaction Lab, and extensive data from campus buildings, including the new Health Sciences Building.
Key themes include engineering approaches to the following research domains:
- Building and community energy, greenhouse gas emissions, indoor environmental quality
- Experimental (laboratory and in-situ/living lab-based) and numerical methods (model use and development; simulation) to study new and existing buildings, communities, and their energy-related systems
- Renewable energy and storage technologies exclusively applied to building and community scales (e.g., integrated into the building).
- Energy and comfort-related building and community systems and technologies: envelopes; heating, ventilating and air-conditioning (HVAC); lighting; controls/operations/fault detection and diagnostics; occupants; energy distribution; and, energy storage.
- The building-centric approach to relationship between buildings and energy grids.