Giorgos Petrou and Duncan Grassie (UCL cohort), Matej Gustin, Kostas Chasapis and Charalampos Angelopoulos (Loughborough) presented their papers at last week’s Building Simulation and Optimisation conference in Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The Tuesday evening dinner was also a celebratory one for the Lolo group, as Matej won the prestigious accolade of best student paper submitted at the conference.
Charalampos opened the first parallel session with his research work on the energy saving potential of control algorithms, while Duncan presented a case study of three complex school campuses illustrating the issues in stock modelling methods and the need to gather national occupant datasets. Giorgos and Matej were presenting on overheating themes, with Giorgos identifying issues with the algorithms chosen to determine whether design scenarios pass or fail the TM59 criteria for overheating, while Matej presented a forecasting method based on time series provided by monitoring.
Many of the other sessions on topics varying from model calibration to occupant behaviour were chaired by supervisors of the Lolo cohort, for example Dr. Rob McLeod (Vice-Chair IBPSA-England), Dr. Christina Hopfe and Dr. Steven Firth of Loughborough and Prof. Dejan Mumovic, Dr. Anna Mavrogianni and Dr. Rokia Raslan of UCL among others.
The conference was useful as a detailed window into the other research being carried out in the field of building simulation and a chance to catch up with colleagues from around the world with presentations not only on presenting complex relationships from urban scale stock models of thousands of distinct building units but also methods of opening up building analysis and data schema so that the general public can understand how the research behind the design of their own buildings from Dr. Steven Firth.
There was also an emphasis on the higher perspective on the aims and objectives of building modelling. The two keynote speeches on the second day gave a 360 degree view of the field with Dr. Penny Carey of Portakabin providing the industry perspective and the need to go further than just compliance towards truly zero carbon buildings, while Prof. Joe Clarke gave a sobering but inspiring assessment of the suitability of current building simulation tools and requirements for the future.
(Photos courtesy of Dr. Anna Mavrogianni and Dr. Christina Hopfe)