Jingming Li worked as an engineer at Building Technology Division of Midea Group. He gets his doctoral degree in Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) at Hunan University. His thesis is about optimizing the digital twin during building life cycle. His research interests include building information, digital twin and energy conservation.
Data is the language of the universe, and math is its grammar that brings information. Information offers the possibility to simulate, analyze and even guide energy consumption behavior. Building energy consumption is driven by the satisfaction of occupants, thus data driven optimization of building operation is an essential option for achieving high efficiency.
He is interested in sustainable design with building information to reduce negative impacts on the environment, which requires the designers to take energy performance of buildings and needs of occupants into consideration.
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Ph.D. in Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning, 2023
Hunan University
Responsibilities include:
Responsibilities include:
Building metadata is regarded as the signpost in organizing massive building data. The application of building metadata simplifies the creation of digital representations and provides portable data analytics. Typical metadata standards such as Brick and Haystack are used to describe the data of the building system. Brick uses standard ontologies to create building metadata. However, neither Haystack nor Brick has provided definitions about the Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) system so far. For years, both Brick and Haystack working groups have been discussing how to describe VRF in their schema, mainly about the classification of VRF and the definitions of VRF units. There were no settled solutions for these problems. Meanwhile, the global VRF market is growing increasingly fast because of the energy efficiency and installation simplicity of the VRF system. It is needed to have the metadata to describe VRF units in buildings for data analysis and management. Addressing this challenge, this paper extended Brick Schema with the VRF module and verified the Brick VRF module. Then, the model and the service framework were developed and applied for a building in China. The framework can serve portable energy analysis for different areas. The VRF module of this paper provides a possible solution for the expression of the VRF system in the building semantic web. The works in this paper will support semantic web in automation strategies for building management and scalable building operation.
Thermal electricity generation (TEG) is a potential method to utilize energy emitted from the built environment. This work presents a prototype of the low-cost full-day power generation solar building component, which can be integrated as the building fabric or as a part of the solar panels. The size of the prototype is 0.04 m2. The overall cost is less than 25 USD. The prototype is tested in various environments to validate its performance. The first experiment tests its performance under the radiation of a high-temperature source, the prototype can generate the highest voltage of 0.8 V. In onsite experiments, it can reach a maximum value of 10 mW/m2 under sunlight. It can also work at night depending on the thermal radiation of the environment. It can also be used in different weather; the performance is even better than the nighttime. The experiments indicate that radiation heat transfer has a stronger influence on energy conversion than the convective heat transfer. The relative humidity has a certain influence on its performance, but there is no obvious effect of radiation heat transfer. Although the prototype has great potential, there are still limitations, and this article also discusses the problems. Meanwhile, this article also points out possible directions for improving design in the future. The results in this article might be helpful for zero-energy buildings and low-carbon buildings.
Building information modeling has been widely adopted by the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industry worldwide. The education of this technology has significant contributions to productivity in the construction industry. Problems in building information modeling education have been noticed in many regions. However, building information modeling education has not been thoroughly discussed in China. It is needed to figure out and present the status of building information modeling education and research in this region. This study used literature review and case studies to find out the state of research and education in China. The status of building information modeling research and education in China was revealed. The study applied natural language processing to summarize research areas of building information modeling. The geographical distributions of research and education were created and compared to the geo-plot of the total value of the construction industry by province. The article found three central attitudes towards BIM education and discusses possible reasons why they were close to the trend of changes in the scale of the AEC industry. Neural network tools were used to analyze the causes of this insufficiency. More than half of the education programs are within engineering management. The geographical distributions of research and education comply with the Heihe-Tengchong Line. The comparisons of education in China and America indicated that Building Information Modeling education in China needs to extend knowledge in computer and information technology.
The proportion of Energy consumption in the building industry is great, as well as the amount of cooling and heating system. Scholars have been working on energy conservation of Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning and other systems in buildings. The application of occupant behavior data for building energy optimization has started gaining attention from scholars. However, occupant behavior data concerns many aspects of occupants’ privacy. Different types of occupant behavior data contain occupants’ private information to different levels. It is crucial to conduct privacy protection of occupant behavior data when using occupant behavior for energy conservation. This paper presents the aspects of privacy issue when using occupant behavior data, and methods to protect data privacy with blockchain technology. Both two options of using blockchain for privacy protection, sending data records as transactions and storing files on the blockchain, are explained and evaluated with temperature records from an open access paper. Sending data as transactions can be used between sensors and local building management system. While storing files on blockchain can be used for collaboration of different building management systems. Advantages, drawbacks, and potentials of using blockchain for data and file transfer are discussed. The results should be helpful for using occupant behavior data for building energy optimization.
Many studies and green building rating systems have addressed the social and environmental importance of site planning. Tools based on BIM and Location Based Services (LBSs) have been developed to estimate energy consumption for material transportation and the surrounding density of the sites. However, the tools are not programmable and limited by their serving phases. This requires solutions that have the flexibility to run site analysis on social surroundings and the compatibility of user programming in the early design stage. Integrating visual programming and web service Application Programming Interface (API) can fulfill the requirements of evaluating publicly available diverse uses of sites and custom coding. This study introduces the method for integrating Dynamo BIM and Amap web service APIs for the evaluations of publicly available diverse uses and transportations. Additionally, implementations of use cases are demonstrated including assessments of Access to Quality Transit and Diverse Uses in LEED v4. Results from the integrated tool are analyzed and validated with survey results. The analysis of results indicates that the integration method introduced in this paper is effective. The limitations, potentials, and future developments are also discussed. The integration of Dynamo BIM and web service APIs might be useful for site assessments in the early design stage or even earlier.
Cryptocurrency is a relatively new combination of cryptology and currency in financial areas and is increasingly frequently used worldwide. Blockchain applications are expected to reshape the renewable energy market. However, there is a lack of studies covering the power usage of digital currencies. Therefore, this study ran experiments on mining efficiency of nine kinds of cryptocurrencies and ten algorithms. A comparison of statistical analysis of data in a benchmark and experiment results of Monero mining was conducted. Thereafter, this study provided an estimation of global electricity consumption of the Monero mining activity. The results indicated that the hashing algorithm mainly determines the mining efficiency. Data analysis and experiments and estimated Monero mining electricity consumption in the world and its carbon emission in China as a case study. In 2018, Monero mining may consume 645.62 GWh of electricity in the world after its hard fork. The Monero mining in China may consume 30.34 GWh and contribute a carbon emission of 19.12–19.42 thousand tons from April to December in 2018. Although cryptocurrency mining and blockchain technology are promising, their influence on energy conversation and sustainable development should be further studied.
Building information modeling (BIM) is considered as a vital technology to achieve building sustainability in China. Many local companies have developed BIM assisting tools to accelerate the transformation of the Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) industry. The industry believed the use of BIM tools would increase the informatization. However, no investigations have been made to evaluate the status of the tools providing BIM service in China. This study reviewed the typical features of BIM tools in China and illustrated the workflows of some representative tools. The common tools were counted. The different building projects where the tools were used and common functions of these tools were summarized. An assessment of their performances based on eleven criteria was conducted after the illustrations. The review of the tools finds that BIM software can be classified into three types, integrated platforms, instant service services, and supplementary works based on the workflow illustrations. The collaboration of these three types would contribute to cleaner production. The assessment revealed that the aspects where these tools played a role in improving engineering efficiency and what areas were needed to be improved. Three suggestions and three potential schemes of BIM tools in construction projects are discussed at the end. Developers need to further explore the cloud data usages, and thus, collaborations of different tools can be promoted.