The use of state-of-the art research techniques, tools and instrumentation at MTCoE has been instrumental in assisting developers, manufacturers, academia and other relevant stakeholders of building industry to drive energy efficient and thermally comfortable constructions in India.
The WATER Calculator is a decision support tool which can be used by home owners, businesses and infrastructure developers to assess the water efficiency and savings in their upcoming residential projects. The calculator assists in determining the project's water demand and potential for achieving the water savings and to carry out sustainable management on site.
The Rainwater Harvesting Calculator helps the user to estimate the amount of rainfall that can be harvested for reuse and groundwater recharge at various cities across India. It facilitates the user to design the capacity of rainwater storage water tank and the potential for reduction in fresh water demand. The calculator also helps to check the design for groundwater recharge structures.
Eco-Niwas Samhita design aider tool is a unique, user-friendly, design-Based tool developed to ease the implementation of Residential Building code at design level. This tool has the potential to help the user to devise the different combinations of material assemblies and select the optimized sustainable solutions to meet the compliance for Visual light transmittance (VLT), Openable window to floor area ratio (WFRop), Thermal transmittance of roof (Uroof) and Residential envelope transmittance value (RETV) for affordable housing at preliminary/pre-construction design phase. The tool has been pilot tested and validated for various real-time projects in-line with the Eco-Niwas Samhita 2018 benchmarks. The tool puts to use the database of materials tested at CoE for its thermal properties and enables appropriate selection of building materials to the designer.
NABL accredited material testing facility at the Mahindra-TERI Centre of Excellence (MTCoE) located in TERI Gram campus, Gwal Pahari, Gurugram, aims to characterize the building materials and assemblies for different thermal properties using state-of-the-art techniques. The key thermal properties of building materials being tested in a controlled laboratory condition at the CoE facility are; Thermal conductivity, Thermal diffusivity, Specific heat capacity, thermal transmittance (U-value), thermal resistance (R-value), and thermal emittance.
The CoE has developed a database of materials tested in the laboratory for its thermal properties and enables the designer's appropriate selection of building materials. Further, the database has been enriched and augmented by incorporating the thermal properties data from some other trustworthy sources too.
Apart from the laboratory tested thermal properties database of materials and assemblies, the tool also empowers users to derive thermal properties such as internal and external heat transfer coefficients (hi & ho), Thermal transmittance (U-value), and Thermal resistance (R-value) of assemblies assumed to be made of different materials and combinations. A user has the flexibility to either use default values or his own values (being realistic) for specific input parameters and consequently obtain the default result and user-specified results, respectively.
The availability of consistent climatic information is vital for indicating the sky luminance distribution to estimate indoor daylight illuminance. Sky luminance is an essential component in assessing the appearance and performance of internal spaces highly sensitive to the often-dynamic luminance of the visible sector of the sky. Sky luminance varies according to a series of meteorological, seasonal, and geometric parameters that are difficult to specify. To overcome this gap, Mahindra-TERI Centre of Excellence's sky modelling study in India aims to analyse and compare available sky models and further define the sky patterns subset from the CIE standard general sky that best represents the sky luminance distribution in Gurugram, India.
The CIE Standard sky type finder is a user-friendly online tool that showcases the prevailing sky distribution model for New Delhi and NCR locations using CIE standard Skies. This data can be used for the passive design of windows, daylight assessment, energy savings, visual comfort assessment, etc., for the locations falling under the respective climatic zones.
The MTCoE (Mahindra-TERI Centre of Excellence) Annual Daylight Plugin interface for Grasshopper allows users to perform annual daylighting simulation using actual sky conditions for the North Indian Region. This tool bridge the gap between conventional and real sky conditions in context of North India, and it is observed that with the use of this plug-in in Grasshopper, a more precise and accurate daylight analysis can be done which shall prove useful in predicting accurate lux levels, DA and UDI etc as compared to conventional methods. The MTCoE plugin uses the data collected from the sky scanner installed at MTCoE facility at Gurugram, Haryana that is representative of the actual sky conditions in New Delhi NCR region on hourly timestep.