Mechanical and Industrial Engineering: BUREK Lab Helps Create Sustainable and Affordable Homes

09/01/2022
By Brooke Coupal

What type of insulation is best? Does a mini-split heat pump work in this space? Are solar panels a good investment?

These are some of the questions architects ask themselves when designing an environmentally friendly home. The process is often full of trial and error, but a decision support tool being developed by Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Asst. Prof. Jasmina Burek and her lab group would simplify the task, saving time and money.

“The tool will help architects find designs that are going to be not only sustainable, but also at a low cost,” Burek says.

The professor and her Building Resilience through Knowledge (BUREK) Lab are using life-cycle assessments of materials to aid in the design of passive, zero-energy and resilient houses across different climate zones in the United States. They assess materials from a cradle-to-grave perspective, which allows them to see the energy impacts and costs at each stage of a material’s life, from production to disposal.

Their assessments build off the work of Burek’s former colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Josh Hester, who created code in the computing platform MATLAB for parameters of materials used to build an average home.

Blake Davison, a UML mechanical engineering senior from Framingham, Massachusetts, is helping the BUREK Lab find where changes and additions can be made to Hester’s code to make it more applicable for passive house designs.

For a house to be passive, it must follow certain energy efficiency requirements set forth by the Germany-based Passive House Institute. These include adequate ventilation, thermal insulation, specific windows, airtightness of the building and the absence of thermal bridges, which are materials with a greater heat flow than those around them.

Through MATLAB coding, Davison can simulate designs for different climate zones that satisfy these requirements.

“We’re seeing what parameters we can change, like wall insulation and window glazing, and how well these designs work for each individual climate while keeping in mind costs and energy usage,” Davison says. “It’s a balancing act.”

Yicheng Zhang, an energy engineering master’s student from China, is taking this research one step further. 

Zhang, who received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from UMass Lowell in 2022, is looking to take passive house designs and add solar panels to create zero-energy homes. He does this by examining life-cycle assessments of solar panels through the software Simapro and calculating the number of panels needed for each house, based on its layout and location.

“If we can get these design models cheap enough so more people implement them, we can help our society become more sustainable,” says Zhang, who presented his preliminary research alongside Davison and Burek at the 2022 International Symposium on Sustainable Systems and Technology in Pittsburgh.

“We want to create reliable designs that minimize the risk of buildings being destroyed.” -Mahsa Ghandi ’26

More than a dozen UML students taking part in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2023 Design Challenge will implement the decision support tool to design a passive-solar house suitable for Lowell.

“They’ll test the tool to see whether we can make better design options for the house right at the beginning of the design process,” says Burek, who is mentoring the students alongside Assoc. Prof. Cordula Schmid of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Mahsa Ghandi, a Ph.D. student in industrial engineering from Iran, is adding an extra element to the decision support tool by working on a resilient building section. She is focusing on designs for areas that are susceptible to hurricanes and determining what materials should be used based on resiliency, cost and environmental impacts.

“We want to create reliable designs that minimize the risk of buildings being destroyed,” Ghandi says.

This research ties into another project Burek is working on that looks at converting abandoned schools in Puerto Rico into resilient community centers and hurricane shelters.

Tropical cyclones have repeatedly devastated Puerto Rico’s electrical grid, including most recently when Hurricane Fiona left tens of thousands of buildings without power for weeks last September. Burek, in collaboration with Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Assoc. Prof. David Claudio, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, is looking to outfit these potential community centers with solar panels to help mitigate the issue.

“The main challenge is the cost of solar panels, and in case of hurricanes, you need to have a battery and an inverter, so it’s challenging to figure out where that money will come from,” Burek says.

Honors business major Jennifer Dossantos is looking for solutions by researching how other organizations have converted schools into community centers in the United States and Puerto Rico.

“With the background knowledge I’ve gotten from my business classes, I can find what strategies work best to fund and operate a converted community center,” says the senior from Medford, Massachusetts.

Henry Cay ’22, who worked in the BUREK Lab while finishing his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, performed solar panel life-cycle assessments for the project.

“I tracked down different methodologies for making these panels, analyzed equipment and looked into the situation in Puerto Rico,” he says. “Now, someone can pick up where I left off.”

Students agree that they have gained valuable experience conducting research that addresses real-world challenges.

“Prof. Burek has created a great opportunity for me and everybody else to progress our knowledge in this field,” Davison says. “She has been there every step of the way, making sure that we’re successful.”