Project Description

his effort is part of larger collaborative effort entitled, Buildings: Resilient, Optimal, Net Zero Energy (BRONZE) for which the abovementioned investigators are currently seeking external support. The BRONZE effort aims to realize a Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building that is simultaneously resilient to extreme events, both natural and man-made. The effort exploits similarities between vibrational energy harvesters, which convert structural vibration energy into a storable electrical form and are most effective in benign operating conditions, and supplemental damping devices that dissipate vibration energy into irreversible heat loss and are most suited when the building is subjected to hazardous conditions

. Both the harvesters and the dampers manifest themselves in a variety of modalities, but a common key parameter is the mass ratio between the device and the host superstructure. This mass ratio is a particular vexing challenge when the superstructure is a building or bridge, with mass on the order of hundreds or thousands of tons. To account for this problem, a multifunctional harvester mass must be considered. Some potential designs include: (1) the mass of a rooftop garden that functions both to improve the appearance of the building and to help passively control the indoor environment, (2) the mass of a decentralized water treatment plant to reuse both building and residential water in highrise residential buildings, (3) connection bridges between buildings, (4) helicopter landing pads on tall buildings and (5) skycourt and skygarden implementation.

In order to investigate these different designs, computationally efficient methodologies must be developed, both for the computational structural design and optimization of these unique structural systems, but also for the characterization of prototypes of these infrastructure scale energy harvesters using real time hybrid simulation.

This project is in collaboration with J.M. Gibert [Purdue], Z. Jiang [SFSU], T.S. Fu [Simpson, Gumpertz & Heger], R.E. Christenson [UConn].