UCL congratulates another PhD success

UCL congratulates another PhD success
15th February 2022 Mae Oroszlany

The LoLo community congratulates Dr Frances Hollick on passing her viva (with minor corrections) in the Summer of 2020. Frances, like many of our LoLo students and staff, remained active in her research throughout the pandemic, and joins several of our finishing researchers who passed their final examinations.

Frances’s Thesis title was “Developing a dynamic method to assess the thermal performance of occupied dwellings”

We spoke to Frances about her research, and time in LoLo.

What was your project about about?:

My project aimed to develop a method of characterising the in-use performance of domestic buildings. I used data collected from four case study homes, and developed a series of lumped thermal capacitance models representing the heat flows of the dwellings. The models required around a week of data to estimate the heat transfer coefficient from smart meter measurements, internal and external temperatures, and solar data. Data from various seasons was analysed, highlighting that the most appropriate model is dependent on both the house in question and the time of year.

What were the highlights of LoLo?:

Having a cohort of students going through the same stages at the same times was so helpful, and bringing together the whole centre at several events each year really highlighted the wide range of research being done and encouraged everyone to broadly consider the impact of their work, and how it fitted together with everyone else’s.

What are you doing now?:

I’m a Research Fellow in the Physical Characterisation of Buildings group at the UCL Energy Institute, continuing to work on in-use estimates of building thermal performance.