A Talk On Energy efficiency in Smart Buildings through IoT Sensor Integration - IEEE BUET Student Branch WIE Affinity Group

To discuss the use of IoT devices in energy efficiency of Smart Buildings, IEEE PES BUET Student branch Chapter arranged the webinar titled “Energy efficiency in Smart Building through IoT Sensor Integration”, housing 147 enthusiastic participants from 16 different countries.

The workshop was initiated at 8:00 pm as Satyaki Banik, Chairperson, IEEE BUET Student Branch, welcomed everyone to the webinar. He introduced the speaker to everyone by reading out his bio to familiarize everyone with his research background. After that he requested the moderator for the session, Dr. Shaikh Fattah, to commence the talk. The moderator shed some light on the topic for the session and thanked the instructors for their valuable time. After that he requested the speaker Prof. Dr. Saifur Rahman to go ahead with his presentation.

A slide of the presentation of Professor Saifur Rahman

The presentation started with a light discussion on the status-quo of the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA, followed by a discussion on how the majority of the buildings that are medium or small in size are not using any Building Automation Systems (BAS). Then, the speaker talked about the WiseBldg platform, an open architecture software that uses scaleable BAS system, facilitating energy efficiency in commercial medium sized buildings. The system targets to control and monitor the major loads of a building, like heating, ventilation, Lighting loads, Plug Loads. Furthermore, he discussed the importance of interoperability between different IoT communication technologies, data exchange protocols and how WiseBldg incorporates multiple protocol interoperability. Then he discussed the energy saving measurements across the deployments of WiseBldg, followed by 4 different deployment case studies. After thorough explanations of the 4 case studies, the discussion was shifted to Battery storage data access, monitoring and control. The speaker also talked about the applications in Solar PV system monitor and control, and the minimalistic UI of the platform.

After that the speaker answered some questions from the participants and that brought his technical presentation to an end. In closing, the moderator thanked everyone for joining and utilizing their time with a fruitful discussion about expectations, challenges and possible solutions arising due to this pandemic situation in research and innovation sectors. He further emphasized on accepting and facing the COVID-19 post-pandemic changes, and encouraged volunteer participation.

After the session ended, Suhee Sanjana Mehjabin, Chairperson, IEEE BUET Student Branch WIE Affinity Group, provided the participants a feedback form. The program ended with a screenshot of the group view of the participants on zoom which was considered as a group photo.