Research Themes +
Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
Strategic Initiatives +
The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) Strategic Plan is the guiding force for our research and development for the next ten years. It clearly charts a path toward clean-energy solutions and focuses on five detailed Strategic Initiatives. The Plan provides an in-depth look at how ETA is accelerating research to provide affordable, clean energy to all while accomplishing deep, economy-wide decarbonization, looking to avoid a rise in global average temperature while simultaneously developing solutions to increase humanity's resilience to extreme weather volatility.
Publications
News +
For media inquiries,
please contact ETA
Interim Communications Manager
Kiran Julin

kjulin@lbl.gov
About Us +
The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

COMFEN 3.0: Evolution of an Early Design Tool for Commercial Façades and Fenestration Systems

Publication Type

Conference Paper

Date Published

03/2011

Authors

Selkowitz, Stephen E, Robin Mitchell, Maurya McClintock, Daniel McQuillen, Andrew McNeil, Mehry Yazdanian

Abstract

Achieving a net-zero energy building cannot be done solely by improving the efficiency of the engineering systems. It also requires consideration of the essential nature of the building including factors such as architectural form, massing, orientation and enclosure. Making informed decisions about the fundamental character of a building requires assessment of the effects of the complex interaction of these factors on the resulting performance of the building. The complexity of these interactions necessitates the use of modeling and simulation tools to dynamically analyze the effects of the relationships, yet decisions about the building fundamentals are often made in the earliest stages of design, before a 'building' exists to model.

To address these issues, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has developed an early-design energy modeling tool (COMFEN) specifically to help make informed decisions about building façade fundamentals by considering the design of the building envelope, orientation and massing on building performance. COMFEN focuses on the concept of a "space" or "room" and uses the EnergyPlus, and Radiance™ engines and a simple, graphic user interface to allow the user to explore the effects of changing key early-design input variables on energy consumption, peak energy demand, and thermal and visual comfort. Comparative results are rapidly presented in a variety of graphic and tabular formats to help users move toward optimal façade and fenestration design choices.

While COMFEN 1.0 utilized an Excel™–based user interface, COMFEN 3.0 has been reworked to include a simple, more intuitive, yet powerful Graphic User Interface (GUI), a broader range of libraries for associated system and component choices and deliver a wider range of graphic outputs and options.

This paper (and presentation) outlines the objectives in developing and further refining COMFEN, the mechanics of the program, and plans for future development.

Journal

Building Enclosure Sustainability Symposium (BESS), April 29-30, 2011

Year of Publication

2011