Horw LU – The Department of Engineering & Architecture at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts has a new building on the roof of its laboratory building. This research module is intended to help rethink resource-saving heating, ventilation and cooling.
A new research module at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Engineering & Architecture in Horw, which was built thanks to a donation, enables the simulation of various construction methods. The 4-meter-high building, which was erected on a 64-square-meter footprint, is part of the The Perfect House project.
It houses two research rooms and a technical room packed with building technology. As the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts explains in a press release, 60 sensors on the room surfaces continuously measure the heat balance and feed this into a computer model that uses it to calculate the surface temperatures. Accordingly, it calls for water at the right temperature in the technical room, which flows through aluminum elements on the room surfaces.
This makes it possible to experience spatial states that result from the use of the respective materials and technologies. For resource-saving heating, ventilation and cooling, it makes a difference whether the walls of a room are made of heavy concrete or wood, whether there are two or six people in it and how a heating or ventilation system behaves in a wooden or concrete building.
“In the built research module, we want to clarify how structural and technical measures can be combined even better and what building technology and architecture will look like in the future,” says project manager Markus Koschenz. The findings are to be transferred to a virtual model in which the geometries of the rooms or the location of the building can be changed. “This allows us to combine the advantages of real measurement with the flexibility of the digital world.” ce/mm
