Energy delivered un-conditioned for thermal comfort

Energy delivery to households can count up to 50% of primary energy consumption in the United States. As proactive response to this classical engineering sentiment, much efforts made to address this energy delivery process, however, have one one caveat in common: targeting at conditioning only air, despite it being a proxy of occupant comfort. What if we rethink the process of how we delivery energy to ensure that occupant comfort is achieved rather than specific air condition is provided? The proposed dissertation offers an examination of the premises and feasibility on reconditioning the energy delivery for occupant comfort, potentially validating a fundamental change of how energy should be delivered. Looking at potentially including the thermal comfort as a final goal for energy delivery, it is significant to understand what is the underlying potential and consequences of a different look at the energy delivery chain. To better understand the relationship between the energy delivery chain and the thermal comfort of the occupants, proposed projects asks three questions: how would this affect future energy delivery designs, how can we include occupants back to our control loop and eventually, how would we redesign our current delivery chain with new objective concentrated on occupants. To put this into project-specific context, three major projects with their respective follow-up projects will investigate the three questions with a feasibility study of geothermal energy sourced from existing oil/gas boreholes, radiant temperature sensing and analysis of occupant comfort, and Sankey diagrams for existing exergy delivery system. Proposed dissertation would offer an examination in full spectrum the existing energy delivery system’s potential to be re-conditioned for the comfort of the occupants for a potentially fundamental change in how we understand space conditioning: this might be incredibly significant as we might be able to rearrange the entire energy supply chain with ever-more challenging energy outlooks.