Berkeley Lab-EETD feature story - Rapid Building Energy Modeler: The Key to Fast Energy Efficiency

A multi-billion dollar market exists for reducing the energy use of existing buildings, if scientists can only figure out a way to substantially reduce the cost and time required to assess building energy performance, recommend energy performance measures, and identify problems in building operations.
 
This is the goal of RAPMOD, the Rapid Building Energy Modeler, a collaborative project involving the University of California, Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and engineers Baumann Consulting. RAPMOD, which was funded by an innovation grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), is designed to tackle this problem head on.
 
The technology, worn as a backpack, is designed to scan a building’s interior, using several types of sensors, as its wearer walks through the building. RAPMOD generates a visual map of the building that can be input into energy simulation models and used to develop an understanding of the building’s energy performance, leading to a list of recommendations for improving its efficiency.

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http://eetd.lbl.gov/news/article/57692/rapid-building-energy-modeler-t