An Acoustic Digital Anemometer

Tufan Coskun Karalar, 2002 M.S. (advisor Jan Rabaey)

As the worst energy crisis of recent years hit the state of California in 2000, one of the major long-term measures deemed necessary was the introduction of smarter buildings to minimize the waste of energy. As the state government started supporting and promoting further research relating to implementation of smarter built environments, there did already exist research on this topic, which dated back to as early as 98-99, with strong federal government support. To name one, the main goal of the PicoRadio project at UC Berkeley is the development of systems that add intelligence to built-environments with  the least amount of infrastructure overhead.
The intelligent buildings can monitor their own energy spending to avoid any unnecessary use. Furthermore, with the widespread introduction of intelligent buildings, the achieved savings can reach the order of tens of billions of dollars, as it will be discussed in the next chapter [DOE2000]  Monitoring the speed of air blown by heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration systems (HVAC&R) can alert us to any overuse of the system. Since half of the building energy dissipation is spent on (HVAC &R), monitoring the building air conditioning systems can contribute to significant energy savings. With these savings in mind the goal of this master’s project is to design and implement an acoustic anemometer that measures the airflow in office spaces. These measurements can then be used to monitor the utilization of HVAC&R systems in these environments, in order to achieve the aforementioned energy savings.