Architecture student wins Award of Excellence


LAWRENCE — University of Kansas Department of Architecture student Aydin Tabrizi won an Award of Excellence for his research at the Construction Information Technology Alliance conference, which took place last month in Dublin, Ireland.

The conference’s theme was leveraging a technology called building information modeling (BIM) to improve the practices of architecture, engineering and construction.

Doctoral student Tabrizi’s case study studied optimizing the operational of performance of a highly efficent LEED-rated building using BIM. His objective was to evaluate its capacity to achieve a net-zero energy performance. This means that the building would contribute as much energy to the grid as it uses annually.

Net-zero buildings have become the holy grail of building designers everywhere, but actually establishing how it can be done is difficult. To achieve this, Tabrizi created a digital model of the building and simulated how it energy-efficient it could be made under optimal circumstances using two different methodologies.

The results were used to compare to the actual building’s performance and evaluate alternative renewable energy scenarios. The results were used to make recommendations for the optimization of the building’s performance and consideration of energy-efficient strategies for building performance enhancement. The research also found that assumptions regarding the efficiency of photovoltaic panels sometimes disregard the fact that they degrade over time.

A paper he wrote, “Evaluation of Renewable Energy Strategies Using Building Information Modeling and Energy Simulation” will be published in the International Journal of 3D Modeling in January. Architecture Department chair Paola Sanguinetti was its coauthor.

Fri, 12/13/2013

author

Charles Linn

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Charles Linn

School of Architecture & Design

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