Abstract
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was competitively awarded the “Maximum Energy Efficiency Building Research Laboratory” (MAXLAB) project under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). As part of that project, the design and construction of two flexible research platforms (FRP) was included to provide new building test apparatus at ORNL. The two FRPs are designed to be capable of being outfitted as test buildings that are representative of typical construction methods, materials, and geometry used in the light commercial market. These test buildings will be heavily instrumented and will provide ORNL’s industry partners a means of assessing new HVAC, control, and envelope solutions under realistic conditions, in a low financial risk environment. The long-term data collected at the facility can be used to validate analytic models which can then be used by developers to refine their potential products and reduce delivery time to market. This paper outlines the FRP concept, long term research plan and the challenges in the design and construction of the base research apparatus and test buildings.
