The focus of Dorit Aviv’s Master’s Thesis (M.Arch 2014), Cool Oculus uses a dynamic form, similar to that found in a Hoberman Sphere, to match radiant and downdraft evaporative cooling strategies to diurnal cycles. Dorit won a Tides Foundation grant to work with Assistant Professor Forrest Meggers at Princeton University’s Andlinger Center to develop her project into a passive cooling system prototype.
When installed, the structure acts as a downdraft evaporative chimney during the day, using natural convection to draw evaporatively cooled air from the top through the structure. At night, the structure opens and allows the slab below to radiantly cool through a radiant exchange with the desert night sky.
We look forward to collaborating with Dorit on the build!
Prof. Meggers authored chapter “Hidden Surface Effects: Radiant Temperature as an Urban and Architectural Comfort Culprit”(P201-P220) in the book “Future City Architecture for Optimal Living” just got released by Springer! Take a sneak peak of the book here!
Currently a Doctorate fellow at the Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA), Clayton’s research interests are associated with monitoring building performance metrics. His current research takes him to Princeton and to shed light on some researches the team is currently interested in.
His Bio from the ETH website:
“Clayton Miller is a Doctorate Fellow at the Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) and is working in the SuAT group with a focus on monitoring building performance metrics. His research is conducted in collaboration with the the Future Cities Lab (FCL) in Singapore. He was formerly the CTO of a Singaporean statup company focused in building performance monitoring and has also worked as a Mechanical Systems Designer and Energy Engineer. Clayton holds a MSc. (Building) from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and a Masters of Architectural Engineering (MAE) and BSc. from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL). He is a former Fulbright Student Scholar to Singapore at NUS and a Walter Scott Jr. Scholar at UNL.”
We welcomed the arrival of Dr. Jovan Pantelic the week before last to rejoin the chaos research team.
His Bio from Future City Lab
Jovan received his diploma in Mechanical (Thermal and Fluids) Engineering in 2004. After that Jovan pursue his Masters degree in Thermal Engineering while working as a junior engineer in the Architectural and Engineering firm. In 2010 Jovan received his PhD degreed at the National University of Singapore in the filed of ventilation. While working as a Research Fellow at National University of Singapore in 2011 Jovan was visiting fellow at ETH Zurich where he worked with Prof Hansjürg Leibundgut’s LowEx group on adoptation of decentralised ventilation and radiant coopling for tropical climate. This resulted in creation of laboratory for building technologies called BubbleZERO that comprised of first decentalized ventilation and radiant cooling system in the tropical climate. From 2012 till April 2014 Jovan worked at University of Maryland at College Park and Harvard University on the development of technologies for air sampling and implementation to quantifying Influenza shedding rates in the Indoor Environements. Since April 2014 Jovan is working at ETH Zurich and is currently at Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore working on implementation of 3for2 concept in UWC building. Jovan’s page in FCL Jovan had worked with Team Chaos on the Theromoheliodome in the summer of 2014 and is going to work with the team on other related projects.
Radiant heat transfer is an often overlooked component in building design, not due to lack of importance (radiant temperature is as important as air temperature when describing comfort), but because of lack of monitoring devices. The average, or mean radiant temperature in a room is a position-dependent, air-independent parameter that is often imprecise and expensive to measure.
CHAOS has developed a novel radiant temperature sensor that uses servos to trace the surface of a sphere in space with a non-contacting infrared temperature sensor. The sphere shape is convenient as it mimics conventional black-globe mean radiant temperature sensors. However, our design creates one pixel of temperature data at each data point, which can be stitched together to create a thermal image that provides the user with a directional thermal image of the room. In the image below you can see the sensor at work, finding a person in the room.
CHAOS has worked extensively using chemicals to induce hydrophobicity on crushed glass ceramics. This is an interesting article on the future of superhydrophobicity through lasers, informed by the nanostructures of natural organisms.
Research team led by Prof Forrest Meggers, faculty jointly appointed in the School of Architecture and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.