Dr. Ruchi Choudhary, Associate Professor

Energy Efficient Cities Initiative, Engineering Department, University of Cambridge

www.eeci.cam.ac.uk

One of the greatest challenges facing the built environment is how to reduce energy consumption attributable to existing buildings. Energy management focuses on the day-to-day operation and the impact of operational decisions on energy consumption can be difficult to forecast.

The ambition of the B.bem project is to transform conventional energy analysis processes to support future energy management of existing non-domestic buildings – whether to assist in small-scale changes to building operations or deep energy retrofits. Theaim is to quantify stochastic and operational uncertaintiesinfluencing building energy use, and to propagate those uncertainties through simulation models. B.bem is a 3 yearproject, which started in October 2014, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the Energy Management in Non-domestic Buildings programme. This talk will present key outcomes of this project.

Dr Ruchi Choudhary specializes in simulation modelling of energy demand and environmental characteristics of urban built environments. Her research spans simulation-based methodologies for energy management of buildings; uncertainty quantification in building simulation models; and multi-disciplinary interactions influencing energy use in cities.

Her recent research focuses on developing tools and methods for analysing energy consumption of large sets of buildings. These have resulted in two parallel investigations: one on how to simulate and visualize energy consumption in cities at high spatio-temporal resolution, and second, how to quantify uncertainties and stochasticity in model inputs by leveraging newtypes of data and computation.In addition, Dr. Choudhary is interested extending the use of building simulation models to investigate novel interactions with associated energy systems incities. Her current projects include: integration of food-production in the urban environment, analysis of underground transport systems as energy sources, and distributed energy networks.