Welcome to PESLL

Prospective and Early-Stage LCA Lab

PESLL research group investigates the life cycle environmental impacts of early-stage technology prior to commercialization to identify environmental hotspots and provide feedback to design of new technology.

Urban Building Energy Modeling

UBEM is a key to reduce buildings’ energy consumption, which is critical as residential and commercial buildings account for 40% of the world’s energy consumption. By simulating the thermal behavior of buildings, Building Energy Modeling (BEM) can be used in green design and urban planning to optimize building characteristics or select the best proposed design from an energetic point of view. UBEM emphasizes on automation to simulate groups of buildings, mostly to forecast the energy consumption of neighborhood and better adapt energy production to the building stock growth and to peaks of consumptions. In collaboration with the Climate and Energy Laboratory in Architecture (CELA) at the Technion, we are working on improving the automation of the modeling. It would enable especially mere residential buildings, that do not have budget for expensive thermal study by engineering offices, to be simulated. The methodology we develop can be used for both retrofitting and early design.


Buildings’ Interactions in Urban Context

The surrounding environment of buildings highly influences their thermal behavior. That is why dense urban areas need a special treatment when doing UBEM as they are highly subject to the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE), trapping heat inside cities, due to interactions among buildings and their environment. In BEM and UBEM, the interactions among buildings are often neglected or oversimplified. Models rarely go beyond considering mutual shading among buildings and when they do, they are computationally expensive, using for instance Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate the microclimate inside cities. Our research focuses on coupling simpler but accurate models with UBEM to consider microclimate and long wave radiations among buildings, the most influential interactions, keeping a high level of automation to use it on mere residential buildings. Such improvement in UBEM can help designing groups of buildings as a whole and limit their influence among them and on their surroundings.