LSU Construction Management Professor Developing Occupant-Centric Energy Management System
December 20, 2024
BATON ROUGE, LA – Thermostat wars are not just limited to the home; they are also common in office environments and can result in negative outcomes like adversely affecting worker productivity and driving up energy costs unnecessarily.
To combat these issues, LSU Construction Management Associate Professor Amirhosein Jafari is leading a project funded by a $159,000 Board of Regents grant to develop an occupant-centric energy management system (OCEMS) aimed at benefitting both employees and business owners.
“By 2025, buildings are projected to account for 75% of total U.S. electricity consumption, with more than 80% of their life-cycle energy use occurring during operation,” Jafari said. “Even a small improvement in the energy efficiency of building operations would result in substantial economic and environmental benefits.”
The project’s goal is to develop and test an OCEMS that is able to capture the building occupants’ behavioral dynamics and integrate them into building systems controls.
“OCEMS uses low-cost sensing devices to capture the occupant behavior dynamics and then connects building and human systems through an adaptive control loop to enable sustained energy savings while maintaining comfort level,” Jafari said.
Jafari and his team, including LSU CM Assistant Professor Arup Bhattacharya and LSU CM Professor Yimin Zhu, are using a small-scale office at LSU to serve as a testbed for prototyping and data collection. The team built a desktop gadget powered by the Internet of Things (IoT) that connects to a cloud-based server and integrates a desk fan to demonstrate OCEMS functionality. This setup is currently being used to evaluate the system’s feasibility and potential.
“We conducted experiments where students sit at a desk with the integrated system, and we controlled the airflow and temperature while gathering their thermal comfort feedback,” Jafari said. “The results were interesting. For example, as we expected, when the temperature is set to 72 degrees and the desk fan is off, they felt comfortable. However, increasing the temperature to 78 degrees and introducing additional airflow of 0.15 meters per second (m/s) using the desk fan made most participants feel even more comfortable. This demonstrated that OCEMS can save energy by increasing the thermostat setpoint during warmer seasons while improving individual thermal comfort through personalized airflow control, something traditional HVAC systems can’t achieve.”
While many offices already use occupancy sensors for lighting, most air conditioning systems do not currently account for occupant preferences. Jafari and his team have developed chair sensors and occupancy sensors to be integrated into OCEMS, enabling the system to detect when an office chair is occupied and adjust temperature and airflow based on the occupant’s personalized settings.
“What we are developing is just a small-scale individual gadget, but the broader vision is to integrate these into bigger systems,” Jafari said. “The idea of human-centric energy management is to move away from treating everyone the same. Instead, we can tailor the environment to individual preferences, reducing energy waste while enhancing comfort.”
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Contact: Libby Haydel
Communications Manager
225-578-4840
ehaydel1@lsu.edu