Low-Cost, High-Accuracy, Whole-Building Carbon Dioxide Monitoring for Demand Control Ventilation

The objective of the proposed work is to develop, demonstrate, and evaluate new technologies for low-cost, high-accuracy, whole-building CO2 monitoring for demand control ventilation. The work builds on a private/public partnership formed between Dioxide MaterialsTM and the Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering (I-SENSE) at Florida Atlantic University. In previous, NSF-supported work, Dioxide MaterialsTM has developed low-cost, low-power CO2 sensors for building HVAC applications. The sensors show better signal-to-noise than commercially available sensors and cost an order of magnitude less to manufacture. I-SENSE is a leader in the design and application of low-cost, low-power telemetry platforms and sensor network systems. Together, the team will develop the electronics and software necessary to interface Dioxide MaterialsTM’s sensors to a building DDC system. In particular, the project will concentrate on developing a wireless networking platform and associated firmware to provide signal conditioning and conversion, fault- and disruption-tolerant networking, and multi-hop routing at building scales to avoid rewiring costs. If successful, the public benefits could be profound: The devices and resulting system will lower the amount of energy homes and businesses use for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC), resulting in significant savings for everyone in America. This will be accomplished by changing the controls in the HVAC system to use less energy by using CO2 sensors to measure air quality and occupancy of each room, and adjusting the HVAC systems accordingly. The U.S. DOE website for information on Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) claims that demand control ventilation using CO2 sensors could reduce the energy costs of heating and cooling of a building by 10-30%. Key Words: Carbon dioxide sensing, demand control ventilation, HVAC efficiency / energy savings, wireless sensor networking