B4, Group B - Cummings

I am an architectural engineer because I have always been interested in sustainability and have always loved the built environment.  Yet few parts of the undergraduate AE curriculum has particularly caught my passion, including structural, architectural, and even HVAC design.  I’ve discovered that my real passion lies in the governing mathematical and analytical principles of more fundamental physical systems.  For this term project I wanted to focus on those underlying principles of a sustainability issue in the built environment.  One branch of sustainability that relates to fundamental physical systems is the issue air quality, either indoor or outdoor. 

            An area of the study of air quality that incorporates both sustainability and intelligent buildings is the measurement of pollutants.  Aerosols, or particulate matter, can be detrimental for some manufacturing processes, dangerous in operating rooms, and are an irritant and can be harmful to human health in general.  PM sensors provide valuable information for the operation of certain buildings, whether it’s a lab, clean room, hospital, or just a building where occupant health or comfort is a high consideration.  James and I believe that it is not enough to simply operate or take information blindly from the sensors.  Sensors provide data that is only a representation of the physical reality.  Accuracy, precision, limitations, and factors that may affect all of the above must be considered for on operator to make trustworthy decisions based on sensor information.  This has been a theme of the intelligent buildings course: to understand not just how to use building technology, but to understand the how and the why behind it.  This is especially important if the sensors are to be tied into a building’s automation system, to be able to transfer the physical molecular interactions into digital signals into outputted data which can communicate with an automation system. 

            This term project involves two major parts: a research component and a modeling component.  James and I will research what different types of particulate sensors are used and how they work.  In particular, we will be focusing on the physical phenomena on the molecular level that leads to the input of data.  This is perhaps the most crucial part to understand as it will reveal the functionality, capabilities, and limits of the equipment.  Another major part of the research component will be to determine how the output data is structured and read by other programs or the user.  The second component of this project will be to model a PM sensor in a computer program, likely matlab.  We can use sample known particle distributions and create a function that reads that data as a sensor would read physical particles.  By varying the parameters of the model sensor we can correlate and quantify how certain parameters and sensor properties affect the sensor’s precision and reliability.   

            There are of course several challenges we will face in the creation of this model.  Firstly, the mathematics behind the transport of aerosols is not elementary.  We also have limited experience with data processing in matlab—with our only formal experience being in engr202 which was arguably less than beneficial.  However, the information we will have learned by the end of the term will have come from overcoming these challenges, and I’m excited to grasp new concepts and develop new skills throughout the course of this project.

Comments:
Sean Coffey
Allison Lock