THE GLOBAL WARMING CONTEXT
Global warming and its implications on the climate will affect all regions of the world and impact many industries. Buildings’ heating needs are expected to diminish while cooling, dehumidification, and ventilation needs will amplify due to warmer climate and increased air pollution. More days with humid hot weather close to coastal areas and more acute desert climate will be observed leading to increased energy use in buildings.
Currently, the energy consumption of buildings is more than 40%, of this value more than 50% is consumed by air conditioning systems.
Nowadays, developing and developed countries are urged to better address these growing energy demands while reducing carbon emissions to prevent the negative impact on the climate.
To ensure better implementation of sustainable solutions for cooling and ventilation for the built environment, new approaches are developed for implementing solar-powered and passive cooling and dehumidification systems. These measures will lead to improving the buildings’ efficiency, ensuring thermal comfort and a clean indoor environment, as well as reducing capital cost and area usage.
THE BUILDING ENERGY SYSTEMS – GRADUATE DIPLOMA
A Finely Tailored Program
As Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” In line with this, the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture (MSFEA) at the American University of Beirut is offering a new online graduate diploma in Building Energy Systems (BES) to equip students with the tools to design near-zero energy buildings, making the world a better place.
All the courses of the program are tailored to promote an integrative design approach to arrive at energy- and resource-efficient solutions. Students learn concepts for reducing building energy needs while moving away from conventional conditioning of the space to directly conditioning the person’s location and delivering clean air to the breathing zone.
By enrolling in the BES program students will learn about systems that decouple cooling and dehumidification needs using hybrid systems that have more than one source of energy and two or more outputs (cooling, dry air, and freshwater). Students will adopt an approach for devising solutions collectively for sustainable buildings which require (to a varying extent) high-tech components for building control technologies, windows, heating systems, insulation materials, heat recovery systems, envelop sustainable materials, and use of renewable energy resources.
The program builds on the expertise of world-renowned faculty who have many accomplishments in the field of energy-efficient buildings, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality as well as significant expertise in energy economics and entrepreneurship. Many AUB instructors have high-impact publications in top journals and others have been involved in policymaking with international agencies such as the UN. As a result, the students of the BES Diploma will acquire a comprehensive approach to the topic and enjoy interesting discussions on hot topics within the MENA context.
World-Class Online Education
In commitment to its vision of a more viable, livable, and equitable world, MSFEA has partnered with Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for Education (AGFE) to establish the Abdulla Al Ghurair Hub for Digital Teaching and Learning in a pioneering initiative to advance world-class online education. The core mission of the Hub is to promote innovation in education and increase access to, and impact of, high-quality education for Arab youth.
In this context, the BES program, a fully online graduate diploma, promises to meet the professional engineers’ needs for flexibility and practicality while ensuring the high-quality academic education that AUB has always been known to deliver.
All the courses in the program are designed using the latest cutting-edge technologies to meet the expectations of students from all cultural backgrounds.
As a result, the Building Energy Systems Diploma is a program designed to help students design energy-efficient solutions for buildings, which are highly demanded skills while enjoying advanced and flexible learning tools to cater for their busy schedules and for our ever-changing world.