Smartphone application for visualizing building air leakage

Conference · Mon Dec 01 00:00:00 EST 2025

OSTI ID:3013500

Boudreaux, Philip ^[1]; Root, Mark M ^[1]; Jatana, Gurneesh ^[1]; Accawi, Gina ^[1]

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1. ORNL

Annually, unwanted air leakage through building envelopes accounts for 4 quads of energy consumption in the United States, which translates to about 10% of total building energy consumption. Locating and sealing leakage sites is crucial fordecreasing building energy consumption. Smartphones are ubiquitous and contain sophisticated cameras and highperformance processors that could be employed to visualize air leakage using the background-oriented schlieren imaging technique, making leak detection cheaper and easier. This technique requires a textured and high-contrast background such as a brick or concrete masonry unit wall, a building air leak that has a temperature difference compared with the ambient air, and an imaging system. This work focuses on using smartphones as the imaging system to visualize air leakages. The paper discusses application development and the results of testing to determine leakage visualization performance as a function of leak temperature. The results show that leaks with a temperature difference greater than 16°C compared with the ambient air temperature were visualized using existing smartphones.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE); USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-00OR22725
• OSTI ID: 3013500
• Resource Type: Conference paper/presentation
• Conference Information: Buildings XVI Conference 2025 - Clearwater Beach, Florida, United States of America - 12/8/2025-12/11/2025
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English