Overview

The Building Technology and Urban Systems Department at LBNL has an extensive array of testing capabilities for material characterization and performance monitoring of a wide range of building technologies.

Whole Building

• Facility for Low-Energy eXperiments in Buildings (FLEXLAB): LBNL is building a set of testbeds and simulation platforms for research, development, and demonstration of low energy building technologies, control systems, and building systems integration.

Lighting

Our Lighting Systems Test Facilities aid research that improves the energy efficiency of lighting systems.

• Gonio-Photometer: Measures illuminance from each portion of a lamp or fixture.

• Spectro Radiometer: Measures the light output of a light source at each wavelength.

• Integrating Sphere: Provides fast and accurate measurement of the total light output of a lamp.

Windows & Envelope Materials

• Advanced Windows Test Facility: Tests new window technologies for energy savings and occupant comfort. This multi-room laboratory simulates real-world office spaces and measures the performance of commercially-available and prototype window systems such as electrochromic windows and automatically controlled shutters and blinds.

Glazing Optics

The Glazing Optics Laboratory has a complete set of instruments designed to characterize the detailed radiometric and optical properties of window glazing and shading materials, including:

• Photo-Goniometer: Measures light transmission and reflection of light-emitting, light-scattering, and light-redirecting materials.

• Spectro Goniometer: Measures angle-resolved scattering versus wavelength.

Material Characterization

• Dektak 150 Surface Profiler: Measures the thickness and deposition rates of thin films grown in our coating lab.

• Pelletron: An electrostatic ion accelerator made for ion beam analysis of materials.

Thermography and Heat Transfer

• Infrared Thermography Laboratory: A platform for conducting detailed experiments on the thermal performance of windows and other insulated systems.

• Mobile Window Thermal Test Facility (MoWITT): Contains two side-by-side calorimetric test chambers for testing the thermal performance of window and wall elements under actual outdoor conditions.

Thin Film & Deposition Systems

• Coating Lab: Contains chambers for growing thin film window coatings.

• Plasma Applications Coating Lab: Contains chambers for growing thin film window coatings.

• Solar Control Thin Films Laboratory: Develops novel thin film coatings, deposition technologies, and device systems for next-generation, energy-efficient windows.

Additional LBNL Facilities

In addition to the above Department-specific facilities, LBNL is home to a number of world-class facilities, including:

• Advanced Light Source (ALS): A particle accelerator that generates bright beams of x-rays for scientific research in biology, chemistry, physics, materials, energy, and environmental science. This national user facility attracts more than 2000 researchers and students annually from around the world.

• National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC): One of the largest facilities in the world devoted to providing computational resources, NERSC is a world leader in accelerating scientific discovery through computation. NERSC is the primary scientific computing facility for the Office of Science in the U.S. Department of Energy.