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Higher Education Sprout Project

The Featured Areas Research Center

The Ministry of Education has been promoting the "Higher Education Sprout Project" since 2018. Among its components, the "Featured Areas Research Center Program" aims to implement the development of universities' unique features, continuously strengthen their research capabilities, cultivate top-tier international talents in key fields, enhance global prestige, while also addressing social issues and significantly enhancing industrial competitiveness.
 

The Taiwan Building Technology Center(TBTC), with the support of the Higher Education Sprout Project, continues to develop research in building energy efficiency and building safety for the following reasons:

1. Carbon emissions from construction and building usage are crucial factors influencing environmental sustainability. Building energy efficiency offers the highest cost-effectiveness among various industries. Therefore, energy-saving and carbon reduction in the construction industry should be prioritized as a key task for Taiwan to reduce carbon emissions. This directly relates to the government's major policies of "circular economy" and "green energy," and is also a continued goal for the TBTC's development.

2. In response to the labor shortages caused by population aging, and safety and energy efficiency challenges due to urban aging, the transformation of the construction industry toward intelligent renovation and renewal can significantly enhance national economic development. It also aligns with the government's key policy of "old building renewal."

Thus, the TBTC will employ methods such as extending building lifecycles, optimizing thermal insulation performance, reducing disaster damage, and intelligent management of production and usage to effectively reduce carbon emissions and minimize direct environmental impacts.

 

Research Topics

  • Building disaster prevention and safety: The research topics addressing major issues such as urban renewal, climate change, and labor shortages include related designs for wind resistance, earthquake resistance, soil liquefaction, and other related considerations.

The research includes the following key areas:

  1. Establishing national standards for wind resistance design of solar panels.
  2. Developing an automated building damage image recognition and safety assessment system after an earthquake.
  3. Creating methods for assessing and improving building damage caused by soil liquefaction.
  4. Researching methods to enhance post-earthquake resilience of mid- to high-rise buildings.
  5. Developing steel-timber hybrid structures and composite construction systems.

These initiatives aim to advance the safety, resilience, and sustainability of buildings, particularly in the context of natural disasters and climate-related challenges.

  • Building energy efficiency and emissions reduction: The research focuses on the strategy for the building net-zero transformation and the development of building material and components. This involves designing strategies to help buildings achieve net-zero energy consumption and developing new technologies for building materials and components that contribute to sustainability and energy efficiency.

The research areas include:

  1. Developing materials and methods to reduce carbon emissions in lightweight building structures.
  2. Developing strategies to promote the construction of buildings that consume minimal energy.
  3. Developing a system to track and manage the carbon emissions of buildings throughout their lifecycle.
  4. Developing building materials that are both sustainable and contribute to energy storage, supporting circular economy principles.
  5. Establishing systems to track the sourcing and use of building materials for optimized, sustainable usage.
  6. Innovating technologies that reduce energy use in building ventilation systems.
  7. Develooping a system to evaluate and optimize urban wind corridors for energy efficiency and climate resilience.

These initiatives focus on reducing environmental impact and promoting sustainability across the building industry.

  • Building intelligence and management: The research focuses on strategy for the promotion of smart construction and the development of fundamental technologies. This involves designing strategies to advance the use of smart technologies in construction processes, as well as developing the essential technological foundations that enable the integration of automation, data-driven decision-making, and enhanced construction efficiency.

The research areas include:

  1. Developing systems that integrate energy storage and efficient power conversion to optimize energy use in smart buildings.
  2. Developing a smart platform to accurately estimate the materials and volume involved in building demolition and renovation, promoting efficient resource use.
  3. Developing models for the sustainable maintenance and management of building materials and equipment, integrating best practices for long-term sustainability.
  4. Developing systems to recognize and optimize public and logistics spaces in response to changing needs in the post-pandemic era, focusing on health, safety, and efficiency.

These research topics aim to promote smart, sustainable, and efficient building practices in the face of modern challenges, such as the impact of the pandemic and the need for smarter energy systems.

 

Under the collaboration of the research team, international advisors, and domestic industry-academic-research institutions, the TBTC has built a solid foundation. Through an interdisciplinary and international research platform, the TBTC connects domestic and international resources to achieve its expected goals. Key highlights include:

  1. Signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the benchmark center, the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) at the University of California, Berkeley, to jointly promote the operation of a multinational research center and implement bilateral projects. The outcomes will influence revisions to engineering standards.
  2. Establishing a long-term partnership with world-renowned expert Prof. Alfredo Ang and top reliability engineering professors worldwide. This partnership includes organizing international symposiums and establishing the Taiwan Reliability Engineering Society.
  3. Successfully striving for EU energy-efficient building projects in cooperation with long-term European partners.
  4. Collaborating with domestic steel structure manufacturers to develop an intelligent virtual-physical integrated production management platform, addressing labor shortages, assisting industry transformation, and driving the sector toward higher-value development.
  5. Developing an innovative steel beam resilience construction method, which has received a patent and has been applied to the structural reinforcement of old buildings, such as the National Taiwan University Medical School, to extend the building's lifecycle.
  6. Selecting outstanding doctoral students annually to conduct researches at renowned global universities for six months to a year, cultivating high-level research talents with international experience, and deepening bilateral cooperative research with partner universities.

The major research outcomes at the 1st phase of Higher Education Sprout Project from 2018 to 2022 include the following:

  • Real-time earthquake disaster prevention and management technology for buildings:

The development of an earthquake damage prediction app utilizes crowdsourcing technology by leveraging smartphones to replace expensive monitoring instruments. The app provides earthquake early warnings and diagnoses the extent of building damage. Additionally, it integrates a conversational disaster prevention robot to assist users in conducting building inspections. This technology offers real-time support for emergency disaster response and decision-making. The app has already been applied in practical settings, including the Water Resources Agency of MOEA and Dafeng Elementary School in New Taipei City.

  • Innovative ventilation technology for high-ceiling industrial factories:

The development of lateral airflow forced and natural ventilation technology allows cool air from outside the factory to naturally enter the building. As the internal machinery generates more heat, the rate at which cool air is drawn into the factory increases, ensuring a uniform airflow throughout the factory. This maintains the safety of the building and the health of its personnel. Moreover, due to the minimal air consumption, this system also helps save energy. The technology has already been implemented in over 400 factories.

  • Building exterior system design and digital integration of engineering:

Using BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology to integrate the lifecycle of building exterior systems, this approach spans from system design, manufacturing, processing, and shipment management to on-site project management. It aims to achieve goals in design management, industrial management, logistics management, and construction management. This integration enhances collaboration, efficiency, and accuracy across all stages of the project. The technology has already been successfully applied in the Yulon City Construction Project.

  • Development of steel-timber hybrid structural systems:

The steel-timber hybrid structure can effectively reduce the overall weight of buildings, achieving both lightweight construction and the goal of sustainable material recycling. By conducting experiments on the properties of timber and steel, the research aims to determine the resilience capacity (R-value) of steel-timber hybrid structures, making them suitable for current seismic design codes. Additionally, the development of lightweight and dry assembly construction methods addresses the current labor shortage in Taiwan, offering an efficient and cost-effective solution to improve construction processes while ensuring safety and sustainability.

  • Building material traceability and management platform:

Using the concept of circular economy, the platform integrates a production traceability tracking mechanism from the perspective of the building lifecycle. By combining information and communication technologies (ICT) with cloud big data, the system tracks the entire lifecycle of concrete, from production and transportation to pouring. This enables full-process monitoring of concrete quality and production processes, enhancing the effectiveness of recycling and reuse. The system has already been applied in the floor slab grouting operations of newly constructed public housing in Taoyuan.

  • Building Operation BIM-BEMS Cloud Management Platform

An energy management platform was developed using NTUST's building as a demonstration site. This platform integrates data from BIM models, smart meters, and IoT sensors, and is customized based on user demand through surveys. It provides functionalities such as data queries, real-time information display, and abnormality alerts. Key features of the BEMS system include a BIM 3D interface and the ability to real-time detect abnormal power usage, making it a standout feature of the system. These innovations help optimize energy consumption and enhance building management efficiency.

  • Key technologies for the intelligentization of steel structure factories

Based on BIM, a system is developed to calculate the surface area of steel components for painting, providing accurate measurements for paint procurement. This significantly improves the efficiency of generating coating data and reduces manual processing time. By utilizing point cloud measurement technology, the system offers digital information to support management decision-making, ensuring that inspection errors are less than one millimeter, meeting precision requirements. The system features a web-based interface that displays electronic forms, allowing on-site factory personnel to record production history and quality assurance information in real-time. This enhances the overall efficiency and accuracy of the steel structure manufacturing process.

  • Building deterioration impact assessment methodology

In the context of above-ground structures, a technology has been developed that uses smartphones to monitor the seismic response of buildings. This can be applied to understand how the dynamic characteristics of a building change during past earthquakes, as well as to monitor stiffness changes due to aging, aiding in the assessment of a building’s earthquake resistance. For underground structures, numerical methods are used to simulate the corrosion of rebar in underground structures. By observing which locations of continuous walls are most vulnerable during seismic events, the research provides insights into the areas that need to be prioritized for structural reinforcement in future retrofitting projects. This helps in more accurate and effective evaluation and strengthening of vulnerable sections of underground structures.

  • Integration of drones and deep learning models for engineering maintenance evaluation

By using remotely controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to fly and capture images of deteriorating steel structures, the system utilizes computer vision deep learning models to identify degradation patterns, assess the extent, and quantify the damage. This semi-automated process allows for rapid estimation of maintenance costs, reducing the operational threshold for engineers when planning maintenance budgets. Additionally, it minimizes the safety risks associated with manual visual inspections of high-rise buildings, reducing the likelihood of occupational hazards for maintenance personnel working at heights.

  • Utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology to provide effective building design decision support

By integrating virtual reality (VR) technology into the development of an office building interior design decision support system, this approach effectively reduces cognitive differences, enhances spatial perception, and improves communication efficiency. It also helps save resources required for actual construction and accelerates decision-making processes. Taking 62 projects in Taiwan as examples, the study identified 11 high-correlated factors that impact the performance of building projects. The resulting performance prediction model, after empirical testing, demonstrated an overall prediction accuracy of up to 83%. This model assists in more efficient project management and decision-making by providing accurate insights into potential outcomes.

  • Photochromic and electrochromic smart glass

The application of thermochromic smart materials (TCSM) in building translucent facades or windows involves encapsulating temperature-sensitive liquid within double-layered conductive glass. This material autonomously changes color when exposed to sunlight, and can also be controlled via electrical energy for rapid heating, achieving the desired color change. The technology offers multiple benefits, including thermal insulation, interactive functionality, energy saving, low cost, and environmental protection. This innovative smart glass technology has been successfully transferred to BenQ Materials Corp., which now produces smart dimmable laminated glass.