Zhai, Andreas present project at national conference

Zhai

John Zhai, Ph.D., assistant professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering at CU-Boulder, and Fred Andreas, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, assistant professor adjunct of architecture at the University of Colorado Denver, were speakers who presented at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) National Conference in Washington, D.C. Their talk concerned their NSF-funded project “Living Wall Materials and Systems for Automatic Building Thermo-Regulation.”

With the goal of achieving net-zero-energy buildings in the U.S. by 2030, this project will develop intelligent and integrated building envelope systems with smart materials and innovative structures upon a series of advanced and multi-disciplinary studies on Zero Net Energy Buildings (ZNEB), passive commercial building strategies, material science, structure engineering, heat transfer, fluid mechanics, system optimization, and architecture integration.

The five-year research grant funds integrated and interdisciplinary building systems research into a new generation of ZNEB buildings. The research team includes principal investigator Zhai with co-PI’s Andreas, YiFu Ding, Kurt Maute and Jerry Qi Hang from the College of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.