Regional temperature variability across the United States contributes to differential building energy demand for heating and cooling as well as differential indoor environmental quality (IEQ). With increasing ambient temperatures from the effects of climate change, these patterns will evolve in the coming decades. Issues related to energy use and IEQ are particularly challenging in multi-zone buildings, such as multi-family homes and schools, which have different energy requirements and airflow properties compared to the better well-characterized single-family homes. The complexity is even greater given that these buildings are targets for energy efficiency measures as a climate mitigation strategy to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Multi-zone buildings also have well-known ventilation issues and concerns about operating costs for schools and other large buildings. It is therefore a high priority to understand more about energy and IEQ in multi-family homes and schools, assessing the implications of a warming climate, addressing competing energy and IEQ interests, and providing sustainable and equitable solutions. This dissertation applies multiple novel modeling approaches to evaluate challenges related to IEQ, energy use, health, and climate change implications in multi-zone buildings. First, we evaluated indoor air quality (IAQ), energy use, and health in a multi-family home in six regional climate zones using building simulation and discrete event simulation models. We found that daily ambient-sourced PM2.5 decreased while cooking-sourced PM2.5 increased with higher ambient temperatures. We also concluded that air changes per hour due to infiltration were higher on the first compared to the fourth floor, especially in colder climates, and we quantified how much window opening decreased total PM2.5 and NO2 concentrations and asthma events while increasing energy demand. Next, we modeled the impact of future weather scenarios on a multi-family home in Boston, MA and evaluated the implications of two stylized policy levers (cooling subsidies and energy efficiency retrofits) across three different air conditioning utilization groups (no AC, some AC, and full AC). We found that cooling demand would increase for the AC groups but heating demand would decrease, leading to net reductions in total utility costs. Cooling subsidies allowed groups to remain thermally comfortable, but would increase household energy costs more than baseline due to increased AC utilization and associated cooling energy demand. Energy efficiency retrofits greatly reduced heating demand and slightly reduced cooling demand for groups already with AC use. Finally, we modeled the implications of combined ventilation upgrades and rooftop garden installation at a high school for total energy consumption and cost, indoor carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, and carbon emissions. We found that the overall benefits to heating and cooling outweighed the increase in energy for ventilation, with a substantial decrease in indoor CO2 and an overall reduction in carbon emissions. This dissertation provides insight regarding sustainable and health-promoting solutions for climate mitigation and adaptation for multi-zone buildings. / 2024-08-26T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45049 |
| Date | 26 August 2022 |
| Creators | Connolly, Catherine Laura |
| Contributors | Fabian, M. Patricia |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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