The Comfort and Energy Efficiency Technologies Laboratory is a space for teaching, research, and extension activities within the Department of Architecture and Urbanism aimed at supporting and generating knowledge in these areas. It encompasses activities related to comfort, thermal performance, visual/lighting comfort, energy efficiency, sustainability, simulation, development of climate files, as well as digital fabrication, rapid prototyping, and mono and multi-objective optimization focused on issues within the aforementioned areas.
It involves undergraduate, master's, doctoral, post-doctoral students, and R&D researchers, with partnerships with graduate programs and postgraduate on Architecture and Urbanism, Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Agricultural Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Meteorology at the Federal University of Viçosa, as well as the Federal Universities of Vale do Jequitinhonha and Mucuri (undergraduate in Civil Engineering and Chemistry) and the State University of Rio de Janeiro (Postgraduate Program in Mechanical Engineering).
It has international partnerships with Pennsylvania State University (USA), North Carolina State University (USA), Universidad de Valladolid (Spain), and Universidade de Nampula (Mozambique). It is part of the Ibero-American network Trapecio/Cyted.
Latecae's main goals are:
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to develop researach in comfort and energy efficiency in undergraduation and graduation levels;
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to promote the integration between undergraduation and graduation students;
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to create extension opportunities regarding comfort and energy efficiency in buildings;
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to develop partneship with the other members of the Energy Efficiency Network;
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to hold didatics developments and to promote experiments using comfort subjects and architectural design subjetcs, to hold the research equipment of the lab.