Achieving New Sustainable Heights with xD Modeling

State-of-the-art green building

Try as you might, you won’t find another public building as sustainable, innovative or close to the moon as Sustainability Base! The $20.6-million, 50,000-square-foot, steel-frame Sustainability Base located at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View is designed to achieve LEED-NC v2.2 Platinum Certification. When complete in late 2010, it will be the federal government’s greenest and highest performing building, as well as the first new NASA Ames facility constructed in over 20 years.

 Sustainability Base is taking green building to entirely new levels through adaptive, intelligent software developed for planetary exploration and aeronautics that interprets real-time data acquired from distributed internal sensor arrays, and interfaces with on-line calendars and weather predictions. The Integrated Intelligent Building Control (IIBC) will track light, heat, humidity, weather and occupancy status throughout Sustainability Base’s neighborhood micro-climates, and optimize ambient environment and energy efficiency, improving its performance by learning. The state-of-the-art system, from NASA technology, is being jointly developed by NASA Ames and Integrated Building Solutions, Inc. via the Space Act Agreement.

 To test the state-of-art building systems that make up Sustainability Base, Swinerton Builders teamed with NASA and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL) to build a full xD virtual model to simulate the future operation of the building’s various energy saving and comfort systems. The modeling process goes beyond the LEED Commissioning requirements. LBNL will provide complete energy performance simulation of the virtual model using Energy Plus software. The actual building is being fitted with energy monitoring sensors and when Sustainability Base is occupied, sensor data will be fed back to Energy Plus. This data will enable the building’s actual performance to be compared to its predicted performance. The data will help to fine-tune the building systems to ensure that it operates at peak performance. The data will also be used to evaluate Energy Plus’ simulation algorithms, which will benefit design teams to design and evaluate future high performing buildings.

Sustainability Base at Ames Research Center, Mountain View CA

 In addition to providing a supportive and nurturing space for the building’s end users, Sustainability Base will also serve as a test bed for a new generation of earth-friendly building technologies. The building will enhance energy efficiency, reduce energy consumption and maximize employee performance and quality of life. Sustainability Base truly is a window to the future on earth and the greenest and most forward thinking building to date in our government’s history.

To learn more about Sustainability Base, visit NASA’s website at www.nasa.gov.
Do you like Green Building? Click Here to watch a video about NASA’s first LEED Gold Certified building that our Swinerton team also helped build.