Research & Development
"Our members and we work together to ensure that the equipment that consumers buy and have installed meets the efficiency
levels they've paid for," Dietz said. "That's really one of the most
important things we do."
Similarly, ASHRAE's stated mission is to "advance the science of
heating, ventilating, air conditioning and refrigerating." The society's
approach to selecting research subjects, however, is different.
Mike Vaughn, manager of research and technical services, said
ASHRAE currently has two funding paths for the development and
award of research projects.
"Solicited research proposals are issued in response to an ASHRAE
developed project work statement," Vaughn said. Unsolicited
research proposals are submitted to the Society by HVAC&R-related
research teams from around the world.
In both cases, project proposals are reviewed by ASHRAE volunteer technical experts from around the world who serve on ASHRAE
technical committees before being approved for funding.
"We also now have the ASHRAE Innovative Research Grant program, which provides seed funding for novel research which does not
fit within the current TC [technical committee] research activities,
but is deemed to have the potential to significantly advance the stateof-the-art in heating, ventilating, air-conditioning and refrigeration
engineering with out-of-the–box 'blue sky' research," Vaughn said.
One research project now underway concerns the development
of software to calculate the seasonal efficiency of commercial space
heating boiler systems, based on an existing ASHRAE standard.
Boilers are estimated to account for 42 percent of space heating
energy use in the commercial and multifamily sectors in the U.S.,
according to the society. Energy savings could be achieved in commercial and multifamily buildings by optimizing the selection of
commercial boiler systems in new buildings and at the time of boiler
replacement. Currently, however, commercial boilers and all other
types of commercial heating equipment are rated only in terms of
steady-state efficiency at full load, which does not provide a meaningful indication of relative operating costs, according to ASHRAE.
The objective of the research project is to develop user-friendly
Windows-based software that will greatly accelerate adoption of
seasonal efficiency analysis for commercial boiler systems. A significant obstacle to the use of any new standard is the learning curve for
users to become familiar with the new terminology and inputs and
learn how to do the computations. With this proposed software, the
level of effort required of new users of the standard will be dramatically reduced, and can be focused on the more important tasks of
evaluating outputs and developing an intuitive sense of the factors
that affect the seasonal efficiency of commercial boiler systems, the
society said. l F O N
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