Jianshun Jensen Zhang

Syracuse University | SU · Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Building energy retrofitting has been acknowledged as a critical path for achieving energy and environmental targets. Prefabricated panelized exterior insulated enclosure systems are emerging as a promising technology for retrofit solutions. However, there is a need to quantify panel performance relative to insulating value and airtightness. This p...

Achieving energy and environmental targets for increasing adoption of clean energy and promoting equity for all requires a new generation of approaches for energy retrofitting of residential buildings. The building envelope plays a significant role in mitigating thermal loads. Prefabricated panelized exterior insulated envelope systems are gaining...

Retrofitting existing buildings to meet and even exceed current high efficiency building standards is a critical approach to reducing the overall existing building energy consumption and associated carbon emissions. Considering the significant role of the envelope in retrofit design, it is important to quantify its insulation performance for assess...

The existing residential building stock plays a significant role in global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Dramatically improving the energy efficiency of residential buildings through retrofits is a crucial step to addressing climate change, offering additional advantages such as improved thermal comfort and healthier indoor envir...

Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) significantly impacts human health, well-being, and productivity. However, a comprehensive and in-depth review of the combined effects of IAQ and other multi-domain factors on human productivity is lacking. There has not been any prior review that encapsulates the impact of multi-domain factors on productivity and...

Hemp lime concrete (HLC) is an environment-friendly material increasingly used in building construction. Many studies have focused on the moisture buffer capacity of HLC, but its pollutant buffering capacity remains unknown. To address this research gap, the potential for moisture and toluene buffering capacity of hemp concrete is presented in this...

The office environment's indoor air quality (IAQ) and noise levels are critical factors that affect productivity and overall health. However, a research gap still exists on multi-domain impact of IAQ and noise on human physiological signals. The research aims to establish a comprehensive understanding of the multi-domain impact by analyzing physiol...

Building surface cool materials are novel materials that can reduce urban heat island intensity and decrease building energy consumption. This study investigated the impact of radiative properties of materials, façade orientation, and morphological parameters on energy consumption in six typical residential neighborhoods in Nanjing, China. The neig...

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, buildings accounted for more than 40% of the total energy. The need for improving indoor air quality (IAQ) not only during the pandemic but also in the post-pandemic era presents a unique opportunity for innovation that meets the needs in both environmental health and building energy efficiency. Carbon-dioxide concentr...

In the United States, approximately 65% of buildings were constructed before 1992, when the United States Department of Energy (DOE) established the Building Energy Codes Program (BECP). Building retrofit to meet and exceed present high efficiency building standards is a critical path to reduce the overall existing building energy consumption and a...

New York State (NYS) has over 750,000 dwelling units with inefficient HVAC and domestic hot water (DHW) supply. To explore the opportunities of carbon neutrality, in this paper, we investigated and evaluated an integrated HVAC and domestic hot water system that could meet all the heating, cooling, ventilation, dehumidification, DHW and air cleaning...

Cool roofs play a significant role in mitigating urban heat islands, improving indoor thermal comfort, and saving energy. In recent years, with advances in the manufacturing of nanophotonics and metamaterials, researchers have developed super cool roofs where the surface temperature remains below the air temperature in direct daylight and temperatu...

As people spend 90% of their time indoors, it was necessary to improve indoor environmental quality to enhance human productivity. Indoor environmental quality consists of indoor air quality (IAQ), thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort. However, only a few studies have investigated the combined effects of IAQ and noise. During and after the COVID-1...

The Covid-19 virus can spread rapidly in the air and cause the epidemic to rage around the world. This study takes a typical office as the research object and proposes four different partition settings to suppress the spread of the virus in the air based on displacement ventilation. And these strategies are verified by DPM model simulations of two...

As people spend 90% of their time indoors, it was necessary to improve indoor environmental quality to enhance human productivity. Indoor environmental quality consists of indoor air quality (IAQ), thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort. However, only a few studies have investigated the combined effects of IAQ and noise. During and after the COVID-1...

Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations based on the discrete phase model were performed to explore the spatial distribution of traffic-related PM2.5 in summer and winter in nine typical neighborhoods (300 × 300 m) established through investigating realistic samples in Nanjing, China. These cases have different building typ...

Since the coronavirus disease 2019, the extended time indoors makes people more concerned about indoor air quality, while the increased ventilation in seeks of reducing infection probability has increased the energy usage from heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems. In this study, to represent the dynamics of indoor temperature and air...

Many multi-story residential buildings have been built in villages to improve the living quality of rural residents in China. Therefore, village morphology has dramatically changed compared to the past. Since northern China continues to suffer from environmental problems, improving village ventilation by optimizing village morphology is essential f...

Respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 can be spread through airborne transmission, which is highly dependent on the airflow pattern of the studied room. Indoor air is typically not perfectly mixed even using a mixing ventilation, especially in large spaces. Airflow patterns in large open spaces such as hotel banquet rooms and open plan offices, are...

In the United States, approximately 65% of buildings were constructed before 1992, when the United States Department of Energy (DOE) established the Building Energy Codes Program (BECP). Building retrofit to meet and exceed present high efficiency building standards is a critical path to reduce the overall existing building energy consumption and a...

New York State (NYS) has over 750,000 dwelling units with inefficient HVAC and domestic hot water (DHW) supply. To explore the opportunities of carbon neutrality, in this paper, we investigated and evaluated an integrated HVAC and domestic hot water system that could meet all the heating, cooling, ventilation, dehumidification, DHW and air cleaning...

Labeling and certification for low-emission building materials and furniture is an effective source control strategy for reducing indoor air pollution. The labeling and certification programs rely on the results from standardized environmental chamber tests to measure the emission rates of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and assess their impact o...

Labeling and certification for low-emission building materials and furniture is an effective source control strategy for reducing indoor air pollution. The labeling and certification programs rely on the results from standardized environmental chamber tests to measure the emission rates of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and assess their impact o...

Indoor air pollution has become a broad problem due to various indoor or outdoor pollutant sources and limited ventilation. A performance-based approach, which is built upon accurate modeling and simulation of indoor air pollutant characteristics, has obvious advantages over the prescription-based method to achieve a better indoor environment. More...

The deterioration of the urban environment has captured the attention of governmental departments and research institutions, which aim to improve the urban environment from the perspective of optimizing urban morphology. Although ideal building arrays and residential building morphologies have been previously studied, research on the relationship b...

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has set a goal of 30% reduction in energy use intensity (EUI) in the building sector by 2030. The majority of opportunities to meet this clean energy goal will be in retrofitting the existing building stock. Approximately 50-90% of energy reduction of existing buildings has been achieved through deep ret...

The influence of roadside morphology and the movement of vehicles on street canyon ventilation is important, but their coupling effect is still unclear. This study aimed to determine the best structural design for roadside buildings while considering moving vehicles’ effect on ventilation. The morphologies examined were podium, cantilever, rain she...

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is vital to human health, comfort, performance, and wellbeing as people typically spend over 80% of their time indoors. The indoor pollutants people are exposed to originate from both indoors and outdoors. In order to devise an energy-efficient and cost-effective approach to improve IAQ, it is necessary to consider strategi...

In order to study the mutual influences of temperature gradient and concentration gradient in the coupled heat and mass transfer process of membrane-based desiccant solution dehumidification, an air-solution dual-chamber system was built. The reduced heat of transfer without concentration gradient is defined, qm2∗=-rmmrmq, to derive thermal diffusi...

Occupant behavior is identified as one of the key factors influencing the energy use and indoor environmental quality of the building. Occupancy-centric control is famous for its potential to save building energy without sacrificing occupants’ comfort. This study utilized two identical lab spaces, configured as typical open-plan offices, to investi...

As more megacities emerge owing to urbanization and industrialization, the subway has become the main public transportation mode worldwide, providing punctuality and convenience. The subway environment, including its ventilation, thermal comfort, air quality, and energy consumption, remains an area of great focus for scientists and passengers. In a...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused millions of deaths and great economic loss globally. There has been substantial evidence supporting the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Airborne route has been considered as a major transmission pathway, which can spread the disease over a longer distance and time. The viral loads in the respiratory tract of a...

The aim of this article is to present a validated model to study the influence of humidity on formaldehyde sorption of building material and the effect of formaldehyde and moisture buffering capacity of hygroscopic porous material on indoor air environment. New empirical formulas proposed to describe the diffusion and partition coefficients as func...

The unprecedented coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has made more than 125 million people infected and more than 2.7 million people dead globally. Airborne transmission has been recognized as one of the major transmission routes for SARS-CoV-2. This paper presents...

Exposure to bioaerosols poses important health effects on occupants. To elucidate seasonal and room variations of household airborne bacteria, this study investigated 30 residential homes during summer and winter throughout Nanjing, Southeast China, with a humid subtropical climate. Culturing and 16S rDNA sequencing methods were combined in this st...

Indoor air quality is an important performance aspect in assuring a healthy and sustainable habitat. Building materials, occupant and related activity are some of the identified major indoor sources of formaldehyde, a high priority pollutant for indoor environmental health. Sorption materials embedded in gypsum wall and ceiling boards have been dev...

This work quantitatively investigated the concentration relationships between indoor and outdoor bioaerosols in residence. We measured bacteria and fungi from air in 28 residential homes throughout Nanjing, southeast China during summer and winter. The culture-based method was applied and the ratios of indoor to outdoor concentrations, expressed in...

Several studies have analyzed the heat flow impact of green roofs in hot weather, but few studies have examined the thermal performance during cold climate conditions. This study presents an experimental and numerical investigation of a large extensive green roof on the Onondaga County Convention Center in Syracuse, NY in both summer and winter con...

Activities such as household cleaning can greatly alter the composition of air in indoor environments. We continuously monitored hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) from household non-bleach surface cleaning in a chamber designed to simulate a residential room. Mixing ratios of up to 610 ppbv gaseous H2O2 were observed following cleaning, orders of magnitude...

Controlling and understanding indoor humidity and pollutants can help reduce the risk of health concerns. The experimental results suggested that there is a similarity relationship between water vapor and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) in diffusion through porous media. In this paper, the similarity between the moisture and pollutant transport an...

Airborne transmission has been recognized as a major transmission pathway for the infectious disease COVID-19. This study investigated the effectiveness of several indoor air quality (IAQ) control strategies on the mitigation of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The well-known airborne disease infection risk model...

A modular-based Green Design Studio (GDS) platform has been developed in this study for fast and accurate performance analysis for early stage green building design. The GDS platform aims to simplify the design and analysis process by embedding performance parameters into design elements in modules and employing near-real-time model for whole build...

Many people spend most of their time in an indoor environment. A positive relationship exists between indoor environmental quality and the health, wellbeing, and productivity of occupants in buildings. The indoor environment is affected by pollutants, such as gases and particles. Pollutants can be removed from the indoor environment in various ways...

Uncertainty exists in many aspects of building simulation. A deterministic hygrothermal analysis may not sufficiently give a reliable guidance if a number of input variables are subject to uncertainty. In this paper, a probabilistic-based method was developed to evaluate the hygrothermal performance of building components. The approach accounts for...

Public attention has been drawn to the commercial restaurant cooking emission since it can cause health and hygiene risks, reduction of the efficiency of the ventilation system, and even fire accidents. The attempt of including the Ultraviolet-C (UVC) lamps with Type I hood has the potential to reduce the grease deposition on the ductwork and pollu...

In order to evaluate the impacts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emissions from building materials on the indoor air quality beyond the standard chamber test conditions and test period, mechanistic emission source models have been developed in the past. However, very limited data are available for the required model parameters including the in...

The present study examined in a field condition a smart integration to the control of ventilation/AC/lighting, integrated with the use of a smart sensing network, embedded PIR/CO2 sensors, and environmental system modeling towards considerable savings of building-operational cost/energy while providing satisfactory thermal comfort and indoor air qu...

The IEA EBC Annex 68 project on “Indoor Air Quality Design and Control in Low Energy Residential Buildings” has been recently completed. The project considered indoor air pollution loads in dwellings, particularly how such pollutants are emitted in dependency of the hygrothermal conditions: temperature, moisture and air flows. Thus, a proper unders...

The effects of moisture content, temperature and pollutant mixture on atmospheric corrosion of copper and silver were investigated by exposing test specimens to different environmental conditions, followed by surface characterization using the coulometric reduction, Scanning Electron Microscopy and Energy Dispersive Spectrometry (SEM/EDS). Printed...

Buildings consume approximately 39% of the total energy used in US, of which 53% is consumed by residential buildings. Besides, indoor air quality (IAQ) have significant impacts on occupant health since people spend on average around 90% of their time indoors. Nowadays, a great number of green building technologies (GBTs) have been developed and im...

The micro-environment in this study refers to the air space and environment around a person that directly impacts their thermal sensation. This study aims at evaluating the performance of a newly developed micro-environmental control system (μX) designed to cool the occupants locally for thermal comfort when the temperature in the ambient unoccupie...

The overall objective of the International Energy Agency project, Energy in Buildings and Communities Annex68“IndoorAirQualityDesignandControlinLow-energyResidential Buildings,” ¹ is to provide a scientific basis for optimal and practically applicable design and control strategies for high IAQ in residential buildings. An obstacle for close integra...

Chemical contamination is ubiquitous in the indoor environment, but measurement options are often limited outside of research studies. This is especially true for formaldehyde, a known carcinogen and irritant. The goal of this project was to develop a novel screening tool: a smartphone-based app that can be paired with low-cost colorimetric badges...

Micro-environment control system has been proved to be able to provide local thermal comfort control. It also has the potential to save building energy by relaxing the control on the unoccupied space. This work aims at designing an efficient heating delivering device (HDD) to locally warm the person to restore thermal comfort when the unoccupied sp...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the main influential factors of the subway Particulate Matter (PM) pollutants under the airconditioning condition and ventilation condition, by an on-site field measurement in a subway station in Shanghai. It is found that the dust accumulation at fresh air shaft was the secondary dusting action under the...

Semi-open space (SOS) is defined as a space semi-confined by partitions in an open space environment. Most of the previous indoor environmental researches were focused on the open space environment, while only a few of them looked into the performance of the SOS. The existence of the SOS is for providing a certain level of privacy to the occupant,...

The micro-environment in this study refers to the air space and environment around a person that directly impacts his/her thermal sensation. Most existing HVAC systems condition the air of the entire room including the unoccupied space, which leaves a big potential to save energy. This study aims at evaluating the performance of three existing air...

As the awareness of public health/safety becomes important and the desire to provide clean/safe indoor air in a sustainable way increases, air filtration technology has become essential at urban built facilities, which are challenged by significant outdoor air pollution due to dense population and heavy traffic. To provide comparable/objective data...

This study aims at developing a Cooling/Heating Delivering Device (CDD/HDD) for a micro-environmental control system (μX) to restore occupants’ thermal comfort when the building indoor temperature thermostat is expanded from 21.1-23.9 °C (70.0-75.0 ℉) to 18.9-26.1 °C (66.0-79.0 ℉) to reduce HVAC load. A comprehensive methods was implemented for the...

This study developed a methodology using Geographic Information System (GIS), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and neural network to help predict the microclimate of the building. The geographic representation of an urban area in Syracuse generated in GIS was converted to the computational domain used in CFD simulation. The flow field around the...

Catalytic oxidation at ambient temperature has drawn wide attention as a new promising method of air cleaning, converting hazardous materials into non-hazardous ones. However, limited information is available regarding catalytic filter performance/characteristics under real operating conditions, especially on service efficiency and byproducts. Also...