 "Photo: Chris Friedrich; The Daily Texan")
By June, UT will be one of the few universities in the nation with an outdoor thermal laboratory used to test the effect of outdoor environments on buildings.
An outdoor thermal platform will be built on the roof of the West Mall Office Building facing Inner Campus Drive. The laboratory will be part of the School of Architecture’s Center for Sustainable Development and used to research the thermal behavior of innovative building components and analyze the structural and visual characteristics of buildings. The results will help researchers determine the best kinds of building skins — any materials on the exterior of a building, including roofs, windows and façades — to use in various environments.
“When you do research in the field of thermal performance, you cannot downscale,” said Werner Lang, an associate professor of architecture. “You can’t build a small box and expect it to have the same performance as a building. You have to do it in a real scale. You can of course do it indoors as well, but we wanted to have a real outdoor lab because we want to do real testing under real conditions.”
The Building Environmental Systems Laboratory, located at the Pickle Research Center , is an indoor laboratory that tests the indoor conditions of buildings and their effects on human exposure and health. The outdoor laboratory will complement the indoor laboratory, said Atila Novoselac, assistant professor of engineering.
“Sometimes I want to have complete control of what’s going on inside a building,” Novoselac said. “However, if you want to see how solar radiation penetrates through the windows, then you need an outer lab. So you can put a [facility] like mine inside the outer lab and check how the outdoor environment affects the indoor environment.”
The outdoor laboratory will be available for research personnel and students who are directly related to research.
To bring the cost of the laboratory down, the University is engaged in a bidding process to see which company will build the laboratory. Lang said he thinks the process will end in four weeks.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University’s thermal fluids laboratory are comparable facilities to the one that will soon be built, Lang said.
“Other labs similar to this one are not focusing on the aesthetics at all,” Lang said. “We’re looking at the construction and functional issues as well as the aesthetics.”
After creating a thermal office in Munich, Germany, Lang joined the UT faculty last year.
“The potential in Austin is so tremendous, especially the use of solar energy,” Lang said. “There’s so much sun here in Texas. You have this richness here with solar radiation and on the same hand you have a negligence with it.”
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