This project is in collaboration with the Sustainable Built Environment group in the School of Architecture.
Each year the city of Austin stays amongst the top of the list of fastest growing metro areas in the country, with an average increase of 160 residents per day. As a result, the building stock in the city is being renovated or torn down and rebuilt at an extremely aggressive pace in an attempt to keep up with the changing city and its surrounding areas.
A database with accurate information about a city’s building stock (including material property data and years of construction) can help do a sensitivity analysis on urban models using a custom archetype library or similar approach. It can also help make urban energy models more accurate and informed rather than relying on the assumption that randomly assigned data will accurately represent a city if the scale is large enough.
The following is a year-built map of the Austin building stock between highways 360, 183 and 71:
Using such a database, and fused with construction materials, allows us to investigate energy demand. For example, the following figure shows the energy demand of the West campus neighborhood.
We use similar maps around Austin’s neighborhoods to investigate the impact of climate change and population increase on energy demand as well as mitigation potentials of retrofitting, efficiency increase, operation control, and urban design.
References
R. Schutte, GIS Map and Building Information Database for the City of Austin Categorized by Neighborhood and Decade Built, MS Report, Dept. Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, UT Austin, Spring 2018
Nicolás Castillo Castejón, 3D Physical models of Austin for energy simulations in future scenarios, MS Thesis, Dept. Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, UT Austin, Spring 2018
