Pedersen joins ASHRAE Hall of Fame

The late MechSE Professor Emeritus Curtis (Curt) Oneal Pedersen was recently honored with a place in the Hall of Fame for the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). He was recognized at the Society’s Winter Conference in Atlanta, Georgia earlier this month.

The Hall of Fame posthumously honors ASHRAE members who have made milestone contributions to the growth of ASHRAE-related technology or to the development of ASHRAE as a society.

After earning a PhD in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1968, Pedersen served as a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign until retiring in 1993. Even after his official retirement, he remained very active in the field. At the time of his death on July 10, 2012, he was working on an ASHRAE research project on simulation of radiant systems.

During his time at the University of Illinois, Pedersen was a well-liked and well-respected teacher, a leading researcher internationally recognized in the fields of building simulation and building heating/cooling systems, and an adviser and mentor to more than 50 graduate students. He introduced many graduate students to the field of building simulation. He was remarkably successful at passing the torch to his graduate students, many of whom are now leaders in industry or professors at universities throughout the U.S.

Pedersen was an active researcher in building simulation and related fields. His research encompassed simulation methodology, development of new models, use of system identification and parameter estimation techniques, room heat transfer and building cooling and heating load calculations, among other topics. He was active in both development of simulations and experimental research aimed at validating simulations.

Pedersen’s contributions to building simulation began in the late 1970s with his involvement in the development of the Building Loads Analysis and System Thermodynamics (BLAST) program. BLAST, a sophisticated set of subprograms for predicting energy consumption in buildings, was developed by a team at the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) led by one of his PhD students, Doug Hittle. In 1983, Pedersen founded the BLAST Support Office, and over the next 12 years directed development of new models and features by a team of graduate students, research engineers, and research programmers.

Under Pedersen’s leadership, the power of the BLAST program was continually refined and expanded. He led new research activities that included development of ice storage simulation and optimization capability, a generalized system simulation capability that allowed users to tailor the environmental control system model to match the varied systems used in practice, and experimental verification of the BLAST algorithms and development of more sophisticated algorithms.

In 1995, the Department of Energy selected a research version of BLAST, developed by Russ Taylor, another of Pedersen’s PhD students, as the basis for the next-generation EnergyPlus program, for which Pedersen and his students were active another 10 years.

Professor Jeffrey D. Spitler, now a Regents Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Oklahoma State University, was one of Pedersen’s graduate students, earning his PhD in 1990 under his guidance.

“Curt Pedersen was a great mentor to many students who went into the heating and air-conditioning industry and into academia. I had the good fortune to know him as a research advisor as both an undergraduate and graduate student. Curt had a very winsome way of mentoring students. He told me once that his most important contributions were never technical, but rather the students that then went out to serve others,” said Spitler.  “On behalf of all of his former students, we’re very glad to see Curt honored with this very fitting award.”