(1207807-TAO) This workshop will be held at Tsinghua University in Beijing during the summer of 2012. It is being organized by a steering committee composed of researchers from both the US and China. The purpose of the workshop is to develop a research agenda centered on bottlenecks in engineering, software and social sciences, forming a nexus of critical issues impeding wider application of net-zeroenergy (NZE) building technology. In particular, the research agenda will focus on the needs for research in order to develop a platform that allows multi-disciplinary, collaborative research results to be shared so that a cyber-enabled, building user-oriented, interoperability modeling approach can be implemented. Achievements from the existing research and development initiatives and best-practices from the U.S. and China provide a foundation for robust future collaboration among the next generation of energy engineering researchers from both countries as the top energy consumers and CO2 emitters on the global scale. While the identification and development of new building product-level technology may result from the research agenda, the focus will be on fundamental scientific knowledge that will foster system integration and universal (meaning cross-discipline and cross-country boundaries) comparability, a mutual challenge. Specific objectives include, but are not limited to, developing physics-based universal comparability of energy efficiency criteria, quantification of energy, health and environmental benefits for zero-net-energy buildings, and quantification of impact of user-building interaction on the zero-energy building performance. The workshop will include visits to partner research sites in China, extensive discussion and ample time for U.S. students to become familiar with unique perspectives of Chinese counterparts and to participate in research planning. It is expected that the results of the workshop will provide the broader research and industrial community with key issues and challenges for needed efforts at multiple levels (individual PIs, multiple PIs, multiple institutions and academic/industrial/private collaborations) for achieving wider penetration of renewable and alternative energy in building sectors at a global scale. Results may serve to inform principal investigators in NSF?s green building portfolio by providing context for addressing a global cyber-enabled model for cooperation and data sharing. Finally, the workshop will serve as a launching pad for a U.S.-China net-zero-energy research network, where many of the research ideas resulting from the workshop will be followed through and more substantial collaborative research agendas will be developed and executed.
The purpose of the workshop is to develop a research agenda centered on bottlenecks in engineering, software and social sciences, forming a nexus of critical issues impeding wider application of net-zero-energy (NZE) building technology. In particular, the research agenda will focus on the needs for research in order to develop a platform that allows multi-disciplinary, collaborative research results to be shared so that a cyber-enabled, building user-oriented, interoperability modeling approach can be implemented. Achievements from the existing research and development initiatives and best-practices from U.S. and China provide a foundation for robust future collaboration among the next generation of energy-engineering researchers from both countries as the top energy consumers and CO2 emitters on the global scale. The workshop was successfully conducted in Beijing in 2012. It clearly identified the human factors and data validation protocols as two primary new areas, which laid the foundation for a subsequent broader research coordination network in order to tackle the research problems collectively. The main workshop was attended by more than 50 faculty and students from 8 US and China universities. The workshop identified the human factors and data validation protocols as two primary new areas, which laid the foundation for an RCN-SEES award to form a broader network in order to tackle the research problems collectively. The workshop presentations and summary are available on the project web site: https://sites.google.com/site/buildingscalesustainable/home. An edited book is currently in press for dissemination and additional information about student participations and media coverage can be found from the following links: http://engineering.unt.edu/mechanicalandenergy/mee-students-went-china-workshop and http://fangtan.china.com.cn/2012-07/03/content_25787652.htm.
