UTSOA

This course seeks to provide students with an understanding of the fundamentals of how buildings interact with their energetic environment, i.e. the natural energy that flows around and through them.  Developing an intuitive grasp of the principles that govern this interaction is critical for the designer or adviser in order to have the ability to apply sound energy design principles in the early stages of a project when they matter most.  

The approach will be to break down the phenomena at play so that they may be understood individually and in limited combination through exercises and experiments that involve geometry, hand calculations, physical models, and computer simulations.  As the results are often initially counterintuitive, repeated practice and experimentation is the best means of grasping this material.  ARC 386M, Integration of Sustainable Technology, offered in the Spring, provides a forum to bring these concepts back together into integrated strategies with the application of systems thinking applied at the building scale.

We will start with an examination of the source of all Earth’s energy—the sun.  Students will learn about its apparent motion, how its energy strikes and interacts with our buildings, and how we might exploit its predictable habits in our building practice.  The class will then cover the concept of human comfort, how people respond to the various stimuli that affect comfort and various models for assessing just what a comfortable environment is.  The final segment of the course will move on to the building, assessing the transfer of heat and light through the building envelope and how these flows affect the perception of comfort.