Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Benne, Kyle.
Alfalfa-based testbeds enable building equipment, control products, and workforce development tools to interact with dynamic building simulations representing the desired building, system, weather, and grid configuration. Alfalfa is used to de-risk implementation of load flexibility prior to field deployment, reducing the costs and timelines associated with adoption of decarbonization technology at the grid edge.
Buildings are active participants in increasingly complex energy systems. Building Energy Modeling (BEM) has a key role to play in planning and de-risking an equitable energy transition, with BEM-backed "virtual buildings" critical path for diverse applications that include workforce training tools, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) experimentation to study equipment performance under a range of conditions, Control-Hardware-in-the-Loop (CHIL) experimentation to de-risk commercial control implementations at equipment through grid orchestration levels, and integration of dynamic load profiles into grid modeling tools for energy system experimentation at the urban scale. Modeling requirements vary across these applications, but many software engineering tasks do not. The Alfalfa Virtual Building Service (AVBS, see https://github.com/NREL/alfalfa/wiki) is an open-source web service that solves these common tasks robustly in one place, providing a foundational platform for power users to bootstrap their own applications. AVBS abstracts the specifics of runtime interaction with OpenStudio, Modelica, and Spawn of EnergyPlus models behind a unified REST API. Additionally, AVBS provides resources for cloud deployment and scaling to 100s of parallel simulations, a growing library of modular Operational Technology (OT) integrations for emulation of real-world interfaces, and scripts to automate the population of communities of virtual buildings from URBANopt, ResStock and ComStock.