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A major research center for sustainable building technology has been founded at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Building Energy Smart Technologies (BEST) Center is a new, five-year multi-university initiative to advance sustainable building projects ranging from HVAC manufacturing, to smart glazing for windows, building controls, insulation, as well as solar installations.

“This is a long term commitment to solve industry problems and make buildings adaptive,” said Moncef Krarti, director of the center and a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. “Many western countries want to be net zero in carbon emissions by 2050. That’s a significant challenge. To achieve that, we need a new set of innovative and smart technologies. We have to combine energy efficiency, reduce demand, and deploy renewable energy into buildings so they can be a net positive, actually producing energy, not just consuming power.”

The project is focused on business collaboration, directing research into areas needed for the construction industry and building retrofits. The new center will operate under the NSF model. This setup is designed to help startups, large corporate partners and government agencies connect directly with university researchers to solve common research obstacles in a low-risk environment. The aim is to develop new technology faster and build out the U.S. workforce in critical areas.

“This will be a really interactive process between industry and universities with what problems to solve. Each project we take on will have an industry sponsor,” Krarti said.

The NSF grant will provide $1.5 million over five years, matched by industry associates for a total of at least $3.0 million. Ten industry partners are already onboard with the initiative.

���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ is the lead for the center, with the City College of New York as a partner site, offering the opportunity research and test new building technologies in the largest metropolitan area in the United States.

The work in New York will be led by Presidential Professor of Mechanical Engineering at CCNY.

“This is a major milestone and opportunity, as it validates our long-term efforts in research and education on building systems as supporting activity to our city,” González said. “We will be providing engineering and technology solutions to connect the outdoors environment to the indoors of buildings to enable smart and sustainable responses.”

In addition to meeting emissions goals, new smart and adaptable technologies in the built environment will provide responses for increasingly frequent extreme weather events due to the rapidly changing climate. The work will also direct attention on emerging challenges in the building sector due to pandemics and health crises such as those caused by COVID-19.

“It’s hard for industry to fund research, but this center is a vehicle to that collaboration. It’s a big deal,” Krarti said. “We spend 80% of our time in buildings. We need to make sure buildings are sustainable and healthy as well as comfortable.”

In addition to Krarti and Gonzalez, other ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ faculty partners include Kyri Baker, Gregor Henze, Wil Srubar, John Zhai, and Wangda Zuo, all in the ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, as well as Michael McGehee in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

Juan Carlos Tiznado (PhDCivEngr’20) is the lead author on a new paper in the and more reliably mitigate it.

Every structure around us rests on soil or rock. In major earthquakes, loose saturated soils that normally behave as solids, such as loose sands below the water table, can transition into a semi-liquid state. That process is known as liquefaction, and factors like the intensity and duration of the quake along with the soil composition in the area play a part in the process.��

Liquefaction remains one of the main causes of damage to physical infrastructure during earthquakes and can prevent community lifelines like healthcare, transportation, and power from being immediately restored afterwards, said Tiznado.

“This work focused on a ground improvement technique known as dense granular columns (DGC), which aims at mitigating the effects of soil liquefaction and improves structural performance during strong earthquakes,” he said. “Essentially, we developed the first probabilistic predictive models that help engineers evaluate the probability and expected degree of liquefaction in sites treated with DGCs. With this tool, we can now assess a site for a variety of mitigation scenarios, to help make informed decisions regarding earthquake risk reduction.”

Tiznado added that the work could be particularly useful when planning around important structures like road embankments and dams that are founded on saturated and relatively young (in a geological sense) granular deposits.

Tiznado started as a doctoral candidate in Associate Professor Shideh Dashti’s��group in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, eventually graduating with a dual PhD from ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ and Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in December 2020. ��He then served as a postdoctoral researcher under Dashti briefly before taking a faculty position at Pontifical Catholic University, where he works today.

The authors used the geotechnical facility at ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ – which includes three state-of-the-art centrifuges – to complete some of the work. They also benefitted from the super-computing facility (Summit) at ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ to perform the extensive set of numerical simulations presented in this paper.

“In addition to physical and numerical modeling, we collected case histories from previous earthquakes using DGCs to validate our proposed model,” Tiznado said. “Consequently, we used machine learning techniques that helped us optimize the postprocessing of data required to develop our statistical design procedures.”��

Dashti said this methodologically integrated approach will, for the first time, enable engineers to reliably evaluate the likelihood of liquefaction in stratigraphically variable liquefiable deposits that are treated with DGCs, contributing to the seismic safety of our critical infrastructure globally.