Development of miniaturized wireless sensor nodes suitable for building energy management and modelling

Buildings consume 40% of Ireland's total annual energy translating to €3.5 billion (2004). The EPBD directive (effective January 2003) places an onus on all member states to rate the energy performance of all buildings in excess of 50 m2. Energy and environmental performance management systems for buildings generally and consist of an ad-hoc integration of wired building management systems and monitoring and targeting systems. These systems are unsophisticated and do not easily lend themselves to cost effective retrofit or integration with other enterprise management systems. Building Information Models (BIM) consists of two major components: a three dimensional graphical reproduction of the building geometry and a related database in which all data, properties, relations are stored however the data sets required to develop these models does not generally exist. It is commonly agreed that a 15-40% reduction of building energy consumption is achievable by efficiently operating buildings when compared with typical practice. Existing research has identified that the level of information available to Building Managers with existing Building Management Systems and Environmental Monitoring Systems (BMS/ EMS) is insufficient to perform the required performance based building assessment. The cost of installing additional sensors and meters is extremely high, primarily due to the estimated cost of wiring and the needed labour. From this perspective wireless sensor technology provides the capability to provide reliable sensor data at the required temporal and spatial granularity associated with building energy management. In this paper, a wireless sensor network mote hardware design and implementation is presented for a building energy management application. Appropriate sensors were selected and interfaced with the developed system based on user requirements to meet both the building monitoring and metering requirements. Besides the sensing capability, actuation and interfacing to external meters/sensors are provided to perform different management control and data recording tasks associated with minimisation of energy consumption in the built environment and the development of appropriate Building Information Models (BIM) to enable the design and development of energy efficient spaces.