Abbas Chokor

Occupant Satisfaction with Indoor Environmental Quality: A Study of the LEED-Certified Buildings on the Arizona State University Campus

Following a recent surge in the green building movement, several universities now require the U.S. Green Building Councils (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for all their new facilities. This paper investigates the actual occupant satisfaction of LEED-certified higher education facilities through studying seven LEED-certified buildings located on the Arizona State University (ASU) campus in Tempe, Arizona. Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) occupant satisfaction surveys were used to collect data from more than 160 occupants. The surveyed LEED buildings earned, on average, a 77.6% overall satisfaction rating. The results show ASU LEED buildings performed better than the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) benchmark, which is based on 59,359 completed surveys. In addition to comparing the results with other studies, this paper highlights an inconsistency between the LEED points earned for IEQ and the actual level of occupant satisfaction. In addition, the paper showcases a need for improvement in the USGBC rating system in such a way that correlates the awarded LEED rating with the actual performance of the building during the occupation phase, as opposed to the intended performance during the design and construction stages.

Dual Assessment Framework to Evaluate LEED-Certified Facilities’ Occupant Satisfaction and Energy Performance: Macro and Micro Approaches

Abstract Given the importance of buildings as major consumers of resources worldwide, several organizations are working avidly to ensure the negative impacts of buildings are minimized. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system is one such effort to recognize buildings that are designed to achieve superior performance in several areas, including energy consumption and indoor environmental quality. This paper discusses testing these hypotheses by examining LEED-certified buildings on the Arizona State University (ASU) campus in Tempe, AZ, from two different perspectives: the macrolevel and the microlevel. Heating, cooling, and electricity data were collected from the LEED-certified buildings on campus, and their energy use intensity was calculated to investigate the buildings’ actual energy performance. In addition, indoor environmental quality occupant-satisfaction surveys were administered to investigate users’ satisfaction with the space l...

Regional soiling stations for PV: Soling loss analysis

The soiling loss factor (SLF) of photovoltaic (PV) modules/system is an interplay between the dust frequency and intensity of the site, rain frequency and intensity of the site, tilt angle and height of the module installation, and wind speed and humidity of the site. The integrated area of the downward peaks of the SLF time series plots for a year provides the annual soiling loss for the system at each tilt angle. Sandia National Laboratories, in collaboration with Arizona State University, installed five regional soiling stations around the country and collected soiling loss data over a year. Four of these soiling stations are located at the U.S. Department of Energy Regional Test Centers (Florida, Albuquerque, Colorado and Vermont), while the fifth station is located at the Arizona State University Photovoltaic Reliability Lab (Arizona). This paper presents an analysis on the SLF for each test site at ten different tilt angles. Based on the analysis of a yearlong data obtained in 2015, it appears to indicate that the Arizona site experienced the highest annual soiling loss with a significant dependence on the tilt angle while the other four sites experienced a negligibly small annual soiling loss with practically no dependence on the tilt angle.

Data-Driven Approach to Investigate the Energy Consumption of LEED-Certified Research Buildings in Climate Zone 2B

AbstractDuring the last decade, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system has embodied the efforts of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to recognize buildings designed to achieve superior performance in several areas including energy consumption. Given the emergent interest in improving buildings’ energy efficiency, researchers have generated predictive physical and data-driven models for energy consumption. Although the physical approaches aiming to calculate the energy consumption behavior at the building level are accurate, the necessity of continuously inspecting and gathering data for all the input parameters often makes these approaches impractical in some applications. The objective of this study is to introduce a novel assessment method that investigates the correlation between LEED certification and the actual energy consumption by investigating a case study of LEED-certified research buildings in climate zone 2B. The research approach first consists of developi...

Teaching engineering literacy to non-engineering students in formal learning environments

Since enrollment rates in American college engineering programs have been constantly dropping, formal and informal processes to teach and learn engineering are on the rise. An opportunity actually exists to formally teach engineering to construction students in US colleges and universities. If non-engineers understand how science and technology work, they can better interact with scientists and engineers in the workforce and make informed decisions about when technology can be a solution to a problem, or when other solutions maybe more adequate. To this date, higher engineering education has been repeatedly investigated through the lenses of engineering programs and degrees. This paper investigates engineering literacy for non-engineering students, by comparing the performance of engineering and non-engineering students when gaining engineering literacy. The methodology of this study consists of analyzing the performance of construction management (CON) and civil and environmental engineering (CEE) students in comparable courses taught in both programs: introduction to geotechnical engineering and geotechnical applications. Data is collected over four distinct semesters. The results reveal that CON students scored significantly higher grades when the course was offered from a non-engineering perspective rather than from an engineering perspective. The results of the study highlight the need to develop clear and consistent teaching methods and techniques that take nonengineering students’ diverse backgrounds into consideration.