Sayfikar, Mahsa

Project Title:

Impacts of occupancy on energy consumption in non-residential buildings

Abstract:

Occupant behaviour has an important impact on building energy consumption. However, human behaviour is highly stochastic and is difficult to capture in building energy modelling. As a result, occupant behaviour in general and occupancy in particular are represented as static and over-simplified schedules in building performance simulation, which leads to high discrepancies between simulated results and actual energy consumption.

This research will try to create more realistic occupancy models for non-residential buildings. To this end, occupancy in case study buildings in retail, education and office sectors will be monitored in order to capture the patterns of occupancy and its relation to changes in energy consumption. The collected occupancy data will be used to generate replicable occupancy models which will replace the standard occupancy profiles commonly used in building simulations. The results of these simulations will be compared against standard profiles and other existing occupancy models in the literature.

Supervisors:

Dr David P. Jenkins
Dr Bilge Erdogan

Contact:

Email: ms286@hw.ac.uk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahsa-sayfikar-7b827757