U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Engineering Laboratory

Building Energy & Environment Division

The Building Energy & Environment Division enables cost-effective, energy-efficient, grid-integrated buildings that have healthy and comfortable indoor environments and reduced environmental impacts through advances in measurement science and standards development.

Through extensive publications and active participation in consensus organizations such as the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Society for Testing and Materials, and the Fully Integrated and Automated Technology Consortium, research results from the Division are disseminated to the private sector in a timely manner and provide the basis for many consensus standards used throughout the building industry.

News and Updates

Embedded Intelligence in Buildings

green construction

Embedded Intelligence in Buildings Program

Ongoing
Objective To develop and deploy advances in measurement science that will improve building operations to achieve lower operating costs, energy waste, occupant comfort/safety/security, and smart grid integration through the use of intelligent building systems. What is the problem? Over 80% of the
hi-tech building

Commissioning Building Systems for Improved Performance and Cybersecurity

Ongoing
Objective To improve the performance of building systems by providing the measurement science needed to develop improved building commissioning techniques that utilize embedded capabilities of building control systems, accelerate the adoption of cost-effective commissioning as standard practice and
heatpump fan

Fault Detection and Diagnostics for Air-Conditioners and Heat Pumps

Ongoing
Objective Develop fault detection and diagnostic (FDD) methods and measurement tools to ensure air conditioners (ACs) and heat pumps (HPs) perform as designed throughout their lifetime and develop a testing and rating methodology to assess relative merits of different commercial FDD products
hi-tech Building

Intelligent Building Agents

Ongoing
Objective Demonstrate the feasibility of AI control techniques for reducing the energy costs of HVAC systems in commercial buildings and create a research infrastructure, the Intelligent Building Agents Laboratory (IBAL), suitable for ongoing demonstration, development, and evaluation of advanced AI

Semantic Interoperability for Building Data

Ongoing
Objective To pursue an effort that results in national and international standards that define concepts and a methodology to create interoperable, machine-readable semantic models for representing building system information for analytics, automation, and control. Technical Idea The new technical
View All Projects/Programs

Net-Zero Energy, High-Performance Buildings

Illustrated cutaway showing the inside of the Net Zero Energy House

Measurement Science for Building Systems

Ongoing
Objective: To develop and deploy advances in measurement science to support the design and operation of high-performance building systems capable of better supporting resiliency, grid-reliability/stability, and affordability while maintaining a healthy, safe indoor environment. What is the problem
NIST researcher setting up air cleaner experiments in large stainless steel environmental chamber

Contaminant Control in High-Performance Buildings

Ongoing
Objective To better understand how strategies to achieve resilient buildings will impact chemical reactions, rates, and concentrations of high-priority indoor air contaminants. To develop test methods and building control strategies to reduce chemical levels in low-energy buildings, and to enable
Figure - Suite of E3 Related Tools and Resources

Building System Economics

Ongoing
Objective To develop and deploy transparent, open source standards-based data and tools that quantify the life-cycle performance of building technologies and systems through parallel activities focused on developing, releasing, and expanding capabilities and adoption of: (1) the Economic Evaluation
Measurement of the air velocity profile exiting a section of the rooftop air-conditioning unit's heat exchanger

Space-Conditioning Options for High-Performance Buildings

Ongoing
Objective Develop and deploy the measurement science to support the implementation of cost-effective space-conditioning options for high-performance buildings. Technical Idea The unique aspects of high-efficiency homes require new solutions for space-conditioning equipment. Because of tighter
L researcher Steven Emmerich adjusts a multi-gas analyzer that will measure carbon monoxide, oxygen, carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons concentrations produced by such a generator located, against safety advice, in a garage.

Ventilation and Indoor Air Quality in High-Performance Buildings

Ongoing
Objective: To develop tools to quantify and verify high-performance IAQ in buildings, provide input data to improve usability of the tools including building models, develop methods needed to support and verify the applicability of these tools to improving the effectiveness of high-performance

Premise Plumbing Systems for High-Performance Buildings

Ongoing
Objective To develop new measurement methods, modeling approaches, and data to support improvements in building plumbing design, utility consumption, and water quality. The results of these efforts are intended to support standards development and industry programs to advance innovative technology
View All Projects/Programs

Software

The NIST Data Alignment Tool

The Data Alignment Tool (DAT) was built to assist with the analysis of data used in testing fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) tools and building

Awards

Contacts

Was this page helpful?