About Us +
Researchers in the Building Technology & Urban Systems Division (BTUS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory develop data and technologies that increase energy efficiency and improve the health, safety and comfort of building occupants, in the United States and worldwide.

We work closely with industry partners, academics and government officials to achieve these goals, and share our research widely
Research +
We are at the forefront of cutting-edge research that redefines building technology and explores all areas of urban systems.

We have been leaders for decades in developing energy-efficient windows, improving indoor air quality, coming up with new ideas to fix the nation's electricity grid, and so much more.

Visit our research areas at the right to find out more.
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Publications +
Enjoy presentations from Building Technology & Urban systems research experts on a wide variety of topics in the areas of building energy efficiency, the electricity grid and how it relates to buildings and much more.
- Presentations
News
Tools & Guides +
Explore our tools, guidebooks and software and download for free.

We offer a variety of technologies designed to simulate and model real-world circumstances to assist in energy-saving programs and help building owners build better buildings. These tools can help calculate performance of building systems like windows and shades, help consumers and builders pick the best windows for a variety of applications and much more.

Publications

Publications By Research Area

2022

Delp, William W, Brennan Less, Haoran Zhao, Spencer M Dutton, Wanyu R Chan, and Brett C Singer."Simulation-Based Analysis of Impacts of Reduced Envelope and Duct Air Leakage on Indoor Air Pollutant Concentrations in Occupied Manufactured Homes." (2022).

Malik, Jeetika, Ardeshir Mahdavi, Elie Azar, Handi Chandra Putra, Christiane Berger, Clinton Andrews, and Tianzhen Hong."Ten questions concerning agent-based modeling of occupant behavior for energy and environmental performance of buildings."Building and Environment 217 (2022) 109016. DOI

Debnath, Ramit, Ronita Bardhan, Ashwin Misra, Tianzhen Hong, Vida Rozite, and Michael H Ramage."Lockdown impacts on residential electricity demand in India: A data-driven and non-intrusive load monitoring study using Gaussian mixture models."Energy Policy 164 (2022) 112886. DOI

Luo, Na, Zhe Wang, David Blum, Christopher Weyandt, Norman Bourassa, Mary Ann Piette, and Tianzhen Hong."A three-year dataset supporting research on building energy management and occupancy analytics."Nature Scientific Data (2022). DOI

Vahmani, Pouya, Xuan Luo, Andrew Jones, and Tianzhen Hong."Anthropogenic heating of the urban environment: An investigation of feedback dynamics between urban micro-climate and decomposed anthropogenic heating from buildings."Building and Environment 213 (2022) 108841. DOI

Hinkelman, Kathryn, Jing Wang, Wangda Zuo, Antoine Gautier, Michael Wetter, Chengliang Fan, and Nicholas Long."Modelica-based modeling and simulation of district cooling systems: A case study."Applied Energy 311 (2022) 118654. DOI

Hinkelman, Kathryn, Saranya Anbarasu, Michael Wetter, Antoine Gautier, Baptiste Ravache, and Wangda Zuo."Towards Open-Source Modelica Models for Steam-Based District Heating Systems."2022 Open Source Modelling and Simulation of Energy Systems (OSMSES)2022 Open Source Modelling and Simulation of Energy Systems (OSMSES) (2022). DOI

Chen, Yimin, Guanjing Lin, Zhelun Chen, Jin Wen, and Jessica Granderson."A simulation-based evaluation of fan coil unit fault effects."Energy and Buildings 263 (2022). DOI

Chen, Chien-fei, Thomas Dietz, Nina H Fefferman, Jamie Greig, Kristen Cetin, Caitlin Robinson, Laura Arpan, Marcel Schweiker, Bing Dong, Wenbo Wu, Yue Li, Hongyu Zhou, Jianzhong Wu, Jin Wen, Joshua S Fu, Tianzhen Hong, Da Yan, Hannah Nelson, Yimin Zhu, Xueping Li, Le Xie, and Rachel Fu."Extreme events, energy security and equality through micro- and macro-levels: Concepts, challenges and methods."Energy Research & Social Science 85 (2022) 102401. DOI

Zeng, Zhaoyun, Wanni Zhang, Kaiyu Sun, Max Wei, and Tianzhen Hong."Investigation of pre-cooling as a recommended measure to improve residential buildings’ thermal resilience during heat waves."Building and Environment 210 (2022) 108694. DOI

Pinto, Giuseppe, Zhe Wang, Abhishek Roy, Tianzhen Hong, and Alfonso Capozzoli."Transfer learning for smart buildings: A critical review of algorithms, applications, and future perspectives."Advances in Applied Energy 5 (2022) 100084. DOI

Zhang, Kun, David Blum, Hwakong Cheng, Gwelen Paliaga, Michael Wetter, and Jessica Granderson."Estimating ASHRAE Guideline 36 energy savings for multi-zone variable air volume systems using Spawn of EnergyPlus."Journal of Building Performance Simulation 15.2 (2022) 215 - 236. DOI

Wetter, Michael, Paul Ehrlich, Antoine Gautier, Milica Grahovac, Philip Haves, Jianjun Hu, Anand Prakash, Dave Robin, and Kun Zhang."OpenBuildingControl: Digitizing the control delivery from building energy modeling to specification, implementation and formal verification."Energy 238 (2022) 121501. DOI

Li, Haoran, Juan Hou, Zhiyong Tian, Tianzhen Hong, Natasa Nord, and Daniel Rohde."Optimize heat prosumers' economic performance under current heating price models by using water tank thermal energy storage."Energy 239 (2022) 122103. DOI

2021

Li, Han, Zhe Wang, and Tianzhen Hong."A synthetic building operation dataset."Scientific Data 8.1 (2021). DOI

Saeidi, Sanaz, Girish Rentala, Tracey Rizzuto, Tianzhen Hong, Neil Johannsen, and Yimin Zhu."Exploring thermal state in mixed immersive virtual environments."Journal of Building Engineering 44 (2021) 102918. DOI

Sun, Kaiyu, Wanni Zhang, Zhaoyun Zeng, Ronnen M Levinson, Max Wei, and Tianzhen Hong."Passive cooling designs to improve heat resilience of homes in underserved and vulnerable communities."Energy and Buildings 252 (2021) 111383. DOI

Wang, Zhe, Bingqing Chen, Han Li, and Tianzhen Hong."AlphaBuilding ResCommunity: A multi-agent virtual testbed for community-level load coordination."Advances in Applied Energy 4 (2021) 100061. DOI

Putra, Handi Chandra, Clinton Andrews, and Tianzhen Hong."Generating synthetic occupants for use in building performance simulation."Journal of Building Performance Simulation 14.6 (2021) 712 - 729. DOI

Bennani, Imane Lahmam, Anand Prakash, Marina Zafiris, Lazlo Paul, Carlos Duarte Roa, Paul Raftery, Marco Pritoni, and Gabe Fierro."Query relaxation for portable brick-based applications."BuildSys '21: The 8th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (2021). DOI

Baudette, Maxime, Jaimie Swartz, Keith Moffat, Jasper Pakshong, Leo Chu, Christoph Gehbauer, and Alexandra von Meier."Hardware-In-the-Loop Benchmarking Setup for Phasor Based Control Validation." (2021). DOI

Chen, Chien-fei, Marilena De Simone, Selin Yilmaz, Xiaojing Xu, Zhe Wang, Tianzhen Hong, and Yiqun Pan."Intersecting heuristic adaptive strategies, building design and energy saving intentions when facing discomfort environment: A cross-country analysis."Building and Environment 204 (2021) 108129. DOI

Wang, Taoning, Gregory J Ward, and Eleanor S Lee."A Python Library for Radiance Matrix-based Simulation Control and EnergyPlus Integration."IBPSA Building Simulation 2021 (2021).

Luo, Na, Marco Pritoni, and Tianzhen Hong."An overview of data tools for representing and managing building information and performance data."Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 147 (2021) 111224. DOI

Putra, Handi Chandra, and Tianzhen Hong."Application of the DNAS framework expansion to occupant population synthesis."IBPSA Building Simulation Conference 2021 (2021).