Engineering Commons^™

Hvac System Energy Audit For Leverett Elementary School, Connor Smalling

Biological and Agricultural Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Leverett Elementary School is located in Fayetteville, AR. The school needs significant upgrades to its infrastructure. The Fayetteville Public School District has voted to pursue an Energy Services Performance Contract (ESPC) in order to finance the desired upgrades to Leverett Elementary, among other schools in the district.

The scope of this thesis was to perform an energy audit on the existing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. By using an energy modeling software, eQuest, the building and the existing base system were modeled to determine utility consumption. Three different HVAC system alternatives were analyzed against the base system by …

Sustainable Travel Incentives Optimization In Multimodal Networks, Hossein Ghafourian

Masters Theses

Tripod, an integrated bi-level transportation management system, is a smartphone application from the potential user’s point of view which would be instantly accessed prior to performing the trip. Since there are constantly several alternatives for any trip, Tripod considers a series and combination of various parameters, including departure time, mode and route, and rewards for each alternative with a number of redeemable points for goods and services called “Tokens”. The framework responsible for computing the optimized number of tokens awarded to the set of available alternatives in order to minimize the system-wide energy consumption under a constrained Token budget, is …

Investigation Of Efficiency Loss Of Distributed Solar Power Due To Soiling And Efficiency Recovery By Rainfall, Amanda Mayumi Tanaka

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

As the concern with global warming increases causing the need for CO2 reduction, renewable energy is of great interest as it has lower carbon footprint when compared to conventional sources (natural gas, coal, oil and nuclear). Solar energy has been drawing worldwide attention since it can transform sunlight directly into electricity with the use of photovoltaic (PV) cells. However, this technology has some drawbacks that need to be addressed including dust deposition on solar panels, also known as soiling. Soiling can decrease PV panel’s efficiency thereby resulting in less energy production. The soiling rates are very site specific and depend …

Global Food Security Under Climate-Water-Energy Nexus, Ehsan Najafi

Dissertations and Theses

During the last few decades, the global agricultural production has risen and technology enhancement is still contributing to yield growth. However, population growth, water and energy crisis, and extreme weather, climate change, etc. threaten the global food security. The focus of this study is to advance the understanding of the associations between crops productivity and large scale and local scale climatic variables, climate change, technology enhancement and assessing food-water-energy nexus to enhance global food security in a sustainable manner considering current available resources. As decision-makers try to improve food security, it is important to identify the impact of technology enhancement …