Chimay Anumba, Head of Architectural Engineering

Chimay Anumba came to Penn State from Loughborough University in the U.K., where he was the founding director of the university’s Center for Innovative and Collaborative Engineering and a professor of construction engineering and informatics. Now department head of Architectural Engineering at Penn State, he took over a department that supports a competitive 5-year undergraduate program limited to 100 students per class year and 50 graduate students.

Founded in 1910, the Architectural Engineering Department at Penn State is the oldest, continuously accredited architectural engineering program in the United States. The department has just completed its new 5-year strategic plan which has a new focus on high performance green buildings. “High performance green buildings are energy efficient, healthy, productive, and safe facilities that reduce the environmental impact of the built environment through the use of integrated systems and appropriate materials,” Anumba explains. “This is vital given the importance of sustainability considerations in the design, construction, operation, and retrofitting of buildings. We have recently been successful in our bid for a new faculty position, co-funded with the Institutes of Energy and the Environment, in the area of sustainable building energy systems. This is expected to make a great contribution to this goal.”

Architectural Engineering faculty at Penn State are leaders in research focused on construction, lighting and electrical, mechanical, and structural engineering. Research facilities include the Building Environment Simulation and Testing Facility, Building Enclosure Test Lab, Digital Addressable Lighting Interface Lab, Floor Vibration Research Lab, Immersive Construction Lab, and the Structural Model Instructional Lab.

Anumba’s own research focuses on the use of communication and information technologies to advance the field of construction engineering, as well as solve problems within design and construction. His most recent projects relate to investigating how to facilitate distributed collaboration between the various parties involved in a construction project. “This involves developing IT tools that would make that collaboration possible,” he explains. “Many construction projects have global teams that span wide geographic areas (and time zones) who need to work together.”

“One of the new projects I’m starting at Penn State is in the area of intelligent construction,” Anumba says. “It would integrate a bit more knowledge into the construction process so that you can track what is happening at every point in time.” Embedded sensors will allow the worker to track movement and integrate components so a relationship with other components can be easily seen. Anumba plans to involve architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) companies to test the concepts he is developing.

Another element of the project is to link the virtual prototype to the actual physical construction. He sees this as offering many potential benefits to project managers. “You can monitor the progress in real time while exploring alternate construction methods,” he says. “You can also make sure the construction is safe by maintaining the associativity of the relationship between the different components.”

A long-term benefit of the project is active control of the different components of the building. “We can start to explore concepts such as Design for Deconstruction, which will enable the proactive reuse of certain parts of the building without any detriment to the parts that are retained.”

In his past projects, Anumba collaborated with companies from countries around the world, bringing in the equivalent of $30 million to his former department. He has won several awards for his work, including an Engineering Foresight Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering and an Honorary Doctorate from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He’s hoping that his current research will be the beginning of an equally successful partnership between Penn State and industry.

Anumba expects to be in his new lab by the time fall semester begins and hopes to have his prototype tested in real building situations by the fall of 2009. Initial investigations will be laboratory-based and will be followed by full-scale tests on real construction projects. “We want to try this out in the lab on a small mock-up prototype, and then migrate to a real construction project,” he says. He also plans to have his research complement that of his department’s faculty and eventually he will be able to reach out to other groups both on campus and in industry.