Sustainably Integrated Buildings and Sites

Mitigation of severe negative impacts on the climate will require an 80% reduction in total carbon emissions by 2050. Commercial and residential buildings are responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries. Therefore, it is not possible to achieve the required reduction in global emissions without substantive reductions from buildings. Despite this need, current buildings commonly consume significantly higher amounts of energy and emit more pollutants than predicted during the building design process. Prediction inaccuracies persist partly because engineers and archi-tects seldom receive any feedback as to actual energy performance and partly because there is a lack of deeply integrated knowledge regarding building equipment, operation and grid/environmental in-teractions in a way that a designer can utilize. The center for Sustainably Integrated Buildings and Sites (SIBS) plans to address the lack of integration and feedback with a convergence of multidisci-plinary research expertise to address inaccuracies in building energy predictions with the vision of developing a scientifically rigorous transformation to the building design process. The activities will also support an increase in scientific literacy, U.S. competitiveness, and industry collaborations by disseminating center outcomes to relevant professional societies, educating high-volumes of students in this field and construction of high-value research infrastructure.Many next-generation buildings to not achieve optimal efficiency and minimal environmental impact as a result of a lack of feedback from the occupied building and a lack of deeply integrated knowledge between building equipment and operation that the designer can utilize. Conflating the aforementioned challenge is the omnipresent shift in regulatory environment that is currently requir-ing all equipment manufacturers to re-design their equipment to include working fluids with less en-vironmental impact. To address these challenges requires a paradigm shift in the approach to building science research that includes a deeper integration of the various disciplines and stakeholders and converges the outcomes to advance the state-of-the-art in building sciences. To support this, SIBS-OSU has a mission to develop integrated solutions within three major topical areas; (1) transition of building heating and cooling equipment to low-Global Warming Potential (GWP) refrigerants, (2) deployment of physical/cyber-physical building systems in grid and internet-connected environments (3) sustainable minimization of the environmental impact of building systems. To support the global SIBS mission, these areas will leverage the long-standing legacy in building thermal systems and equipment research to facilitate research collaborations between the building equipment manufactur-ers with the engineers and practitioners that design, build, and operate the buildings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.