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The list provided below is an
indication of research needed to continue to develop the energy efficiency and
durability of building foundation systems. These needs have emerged from
the research carried out to date.
|
Need |
Posting
Date |
1.
Development of Certification Standards and Methods for Building Foundation
Insulation System Compliance with the MN Energy Code Performance Option.
The current draft of the 2006 MN Building Energy Code contains new
language for the building foundation rule. Part of this language
specifies a performance option that can be used to design building
foundation insulation systems. However, as written, the rule provides
no specific guidance on how to determine compliance with the performance
option (that is, no test standards) and perhaps of greater importance, no
specification of design internal and external boundary conditions.
These decisions are left to the discretion of the designer with the proviso
that the design boundary conditions be posted in the building. Clearly
this situation is not desirable and does not promote the intended use of the
performance option to encourage the building industry to offer
cost-effective and innovative building foundation insulation systems that
can enhance the energy conservation performance of buildings. |
2/1/06 |
2.
Development of a Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation Model of Coupled
Compressible and Incompressible Flow with Quantum Mechanical Phase Change
for Foundation Insulation Systems.
Currently available hygrothermal building simulation tools (such the IBP
WUFI program) have been shown to be ineffective in reproducing the
experimental results from basement walls obtained at the Foundation Test
Facility. This emerges essentially from an inability of these codes to
include hydrostatic and hydrodynamic pressure driven advective bulk water
flows under continuous, plug and free surface flow conditions. A
further issue is their inability to accurately model solid/liquid and
liquid/gas phase changes simultaneously as well as their limitations with
regard to accurately reproducing adsorption and absorption physics without
reliance on continuum approximations such as sorption isotherms. While
these effects can be modeled to a greater or lesser extent with some
"standard" Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations, such simulations are
not tractable for practical building foundation design computation purposes
that require extended real time transient simulation periods (17000 hours or
greater) and large domains (100,000 control volumes or greater) in the
presence of multiple information propagation velocities. |
2/1/06 |
Please contact Louise Goldberg at
goldb001@umn.edu
for further information or for an expression of interest
in participating in or contributing to research projects that would address
these needs. |