When San Diego-based Palomar Health (PH) realized that the state’s seismic upgrade requirements would have been cost-prohibitive to implement in their existing Hospital building, Palomar Health took the opportunity to build a new, technologically advanced hospital that would require its employees to reinvent how they deliver healthcare for the 21st century. The presentation summarizes the advanced design methods and constant focus towards flexibility that will enable this hospital to adapt to virtually any code cycle that may be adopted by the State or other Authority Having Jurisdiction.

The University of San Diego’s (USD’s) newly adopted Climate Action (CAP) plan sets a framework to reduce USD’s greenhouse gas emissions and contribution to climate change. The CAP sets out a general methodology for establishing short, medium and long term strategic goals and feedback mechanisms to provide performance data, as well as a number of specific recommendations to improve sustainability performance of the University. This presentation showcases how USD is implementing changes in their campus design standards, energy dashboards, and measurement and verification systems to address their building related impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

The impacts of a changing climate are wide-ranging in both impact and scope. This presentation focuses on the effect climate variability would have on Salt Lake County’s energy demand and air quality impacts. Salt Lake County, UT is a Zone 5, Subtype B climate encompassing the state capital, Salt Lake City, and the University of Utah (UU). Energy demand scenarios derived using climate predictions for 2040-50 are presented at three scales: individual building, central business district, and county level. The Wasatch Front Regional Council’s regional transportation and land use projections for 2040 were used as the backbone of our urbanization growth predictions.

Human thermal sensation and comfort are important topics in the design and operation of occupied spaces. Steady state thermal sensation and comfort has been widely studied and has robust predictive models available for designers but responses to transient conditions have received much less attention. The current study reports on the transient thermal comfort and sensation reported by subjects while playing a video game. Chamber temperatures ranged from 25°C starting temperature to 40°C and then back to 25°C in a symmetrical profile design. The rise and fall occurred over a 20 minute time frame.

Micro cogeneration and micro trigeneration technologies have the potential to reduce domestic energy consumption and create more resilient buildings. In this work, variations in residential heat to power ratio due to climate change are assessed in the Northeastern climate of the United States. Simulations of high R-value walls are compared to older wall constructions in current and future climate conditions. Impacts on current micro cogeneration design are discussed. The study explores the interrelationship between climate, enclosure and micro cogeneration heat to power ratio with the goal of developing and designing enclosure and micro cogeneration systems that are more adaptive to climate changes.

Three AHRTI projects on flammable refrigerants and their status are presented: Benchmarking Risk by Real Life Leaks and Ignitions Testing, Leak Detection of A2L Refrigerants in HVACR Equipment and Investigation of Hot surface Ignition Temperature for 2L Refrigerants.

Three ASHRAE projects on flammable refrigerants and their status are presented: ASHRAE 1806 Flammable Refrigerants Post-ignition Risk Assessment, ASHRAE 1807: Guidelines for flammable refrigerant handling, transporting, storing and equipment servicing and installation and ASHRAE 1808: Servicing and Installing Equipment using Flammable Refrigerants: Assessment of Field-made Mechanical Joints.

In this project, ORNL reviews existing information on available studies and methodologies for determining safe charge limits for equipment employing flammable refrigerants. ORNL will then embark on a modeling campaign to evaluate different leak source and rate scenarios for various types of equipment employing A2L refrigerants using CFD dispersion modeling. The project status update is also presented.

For the thermodynamic performance of refrigerants, there exists predictive tools that can be used for working fluid optimization. It would be highly desirable if such a capability could be developed for flammability. The goal of the present project is to develop the capability to predict, from first principles, the burning velocity of pure refrigerants (R32, R125, R134a, R152a, 1234yf, and 1234ze(E)), as well as their blends. Once developed, the predictive models can then be used to understand the effect of individual components of blends on the burning velocity so that guiding principles can be developed for reducing flammability.