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Projects/Programs

Displaying 1 - 25 of 55

Building Integration with Smart Grid

Ongoing
Objective - To develop the measurement science for industry standards that will enable interconnection of home and building automation and control systems with a future "smart" utility grid, provide consumers with energy usage information, and support industry efforts to develop the needed standards

Building-Level Seismic Performance Assessment

Ongoing
Objective: To better understand the seismic performance of buildings designed in areas of medium-to-high seismicity and to identify ways to create enhanced performance through low-damage approaches, improved code provisions, and improved analysis procedures. What is the Problem? Despite progress

Coastal Inundation: Hazard Characterization and Structural Design

Ongoing
Objective - To develop next-generation methods and tools to better characterize coastal inundation hazards, associated loads, and response of structures, thus enabling performance-based standards for designing structures that resist coastal inundation. What is the new technical idea? Current design

Collapse Assessment of Buildings under Seismic Loading

Completed
Objective - To evaluate the collapse probabilities of a suite of steel buildings for a series of increasingly severe earthquake ground motions, and to compare these probabilities to the collapse objective presumed in ASCE/SEI 7. The probabilities of collapse will be determined using the methodology

Commissioning Building Systems for Improved Energy Performance

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

Contaminant Control in High-Performance Buildings

Ongoing
Objectives: 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

Design Fires for Structures Project

Completed
Objective: By 2016 to develop (1) the measurement science to fully characterize, deliver, and measure repeatable structurally significant fires for use in large-scale structural fire experiments and (2) a performance-based design framework linking fire intensity measures with expected structural

Design Methods for Resilient Community Systems

Ongoing
Objective - To advance design and assessment methods for buildings and infrastructure to improve their ability to support the social and economic functions they support and community resilience. What is the technical idea? Quantitative approaches to identify and evaluate the performance of the built

Development of a First-Generation Community-Resilience Systems Model

Ongoing
Objective - To develop computer-based tools that facilitate exploration of decision alternatives for community resilience and that specifically address key challenges related to the scale and interdependencies of the system and the complexities of the planning process. What is the new technical idea

Development and Implementation of the Community Resilience Planning Guides

Ongoing
Objective - To develop guidance documents ( Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems and supporting Guide Briefs) to improve community resilience and to collect data from communities implementing the guidance documents to inform future versions. What is the new

Disaster and Failure Studies & Disaster Metrology Studies

Ongoing
Objective - To provide leadership, coordination, and management for (1) the conduct of disaster and failure studies, including the development and maintenance of an archival data repository, (2) promoting the implementation of recommendations from disaster and failure studies, (3) carrying out the

Earthquake Risk Reduction in Buildings and Infrastructure Program

Ongoing
Objective: The Program’s objective is to develop and advance knowledge which can improve codes, standards, and design guidelines for earthquake risk mitigation of buildings and infrastructure systems with the focus on recovery-based design. These efforts supplement NIST’s role as lead agency for the

Electrical Performance Measurements of Solar Photovoltaic Cells and Arrays

Ongoing
Objective - To develop and improve the measurement science to: (1) accurately characterize the electrical and optical performance of solar photovoltaic cells, (2) design a standard reference cell with appropriate calibrations under a standard reporting condition or an ad-hoc reporting condition as

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 efficiency, occupant comfort/safety/security, and smart grid integration through the use of intelligent building systems. What is the problem? “The world is

Energy Measurements for Existing Residential Buildings Project

Ongoing
Objective: To improve estimates of residential whole-building energy consumption by 2014 through characterization of uncertainties of tools used in providing energy feedback to building occupants and selecting retrofit options to improve the performance of existing buildings. What is the new

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. What

Fire Risk Reduction in Buildings Program

Ongoing
Objective: To develop and apply advances in fire and structure-fire measurement capabilities and behavior predictive computational tools, standardized fire testing tools and methodologies, advanced fire detection technologies, and advanced fire resistant materials to enable innovative, cost

Fire Risk Reduction in Communities Program

Ongoing
Objective: To develop and deploy advances in measurement science to improve the resilience of communities and structures to unwanted fires through innovative fire protection and response technologies and tactics. What is the new technical idea? There are two new technical ideas, using measurement

Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Transport

Completed
Objective - Create a well-characterized highly accurate reference measurement system at near industrial scale to demonstrate a framework for conducting low-uncertainty measurements of carbon dioxide emissions, and to improve and evaluate atmospheric dispersion models for reducing model uncertainties