Overview

Building energy systems have a profound impact on the human condition, providing a comfortable, healthy, and productive indoor environment for daily life, while being responsible for significant energy, environmental, and economic costs. Buildings must meet increasingly complex objectives to achieve greater electrification and decarbonization and respond to societal needs for affordable housing and changes in the use of commercial buildings. To design effective solutions and analyze their performance, both engineers and architects need to stand on a solid foundation of engineering fundamentals, which this course intends to impart. After reviewing the motivation, history, and trends in building energy system design, you will learn psychrometric applications and analysis, the climate factors that affect building system design, the application of heat transfer to building heat gains and losses, and the calculation of heating and cooling loads that drive the engineering design of building energy systems, covered in subsequent courses.

Syllabus

Motivation, History, and Trends in Building Energy Systems

Welcome to Engineering Foundation for Building Energy Systems. Building energy systems have a long history of providing a comfortable, healthy, and productive indoor environment, but at significant cost. This module describes typical system configurations and equipment functionality as well as explores design goals and strategies for design optimization for the benefit of occupants, owners, society, and the environment.

Psychrometric Applications and Performance Comparisons

In this module, you will understand the thermodynamic properties of moist air and psychrometric processes and apply these principles to analyze the performance of building energy equipment and systems in response to building zone loads.

Outdoor Environment

Building loads are driven by the external environment in the form of heat and mass exchange with outdoor air and heat gains from solar energy. In this module, you will calculate the impact of solar radiation on building heat transfer and understand the characteristics of design weather days for building energy system design.

Components of Building Heat Gain and Loss

In this module, you will apply heat transfer methods to calculate both steady state and transient heat transmission through opaque and transparent construction elements as well as through infiltration and ventilation.

Heating and Cooling Loads

In this module, you will apply methods from the previous modules to calculate design heating and cooling loads on building energy systems using alternative calculation strategies. You will analyze the impact of key variables on the design loads.

Final Assessment

This final exam comprehensively tests your understanding of all five modules of this course through a set of both conceptual and quantitative questions. Specifically, you can expect 11 multiple-choice conceptual and 3 quantitative questions. Some of the conceptual questions will involve simple arithmetic calculations, while for the quantitative questions, you will need to employ your computational tools that you developed for a) the Module 3 graded assessment questions on total clear sky solar radiation incident on a vertical building surface, b) the Module 4 graded assessment questions on transient heat transfer through opaque walls using the RC thermal networks, and c) the Module 5 graded assessment questions on design cooling loads. Review these tools and have them ready before you embark on the final exam.