Smart Buildings & Cities EngD programThe Smart Buildings & Cities EngD program wants to contribute to the transition towards smart, intelligent and sustainable cities where quality of life is high. This transition requires new solutions which can only be created through multiscale and transdisciplinary (design) approaches. This requires technical designers who are able to work in a multidisciplinary environment and know how to communicate with different disciplines and stake holders. This EngD program educates trainees to become those technical designers! Please note that this program is about technological design, i.e., the process of solving problems by means of a technological design, this in contrast to (PhD) research, which is the process of understanding problems.
The Department of the Built Environment of the Eindhoven University of Technology offers you a trainee position to follow a two-year post-master technological designer program, which leads to the degree of 'Engineering Doctorate' (EngD). The program consists of two main parts running in parallel:
- Half of the program consists of post-master level education in the form of generic design projects and courses about design methods, entrepreneurship and professional skills. Furthermore, it includes several technical courses about topics relevant to SBC. This part of the program also offers ample opportunity to develop professional skills.
- The other half of the program is dedicated to an individual design project in collaboration with a company. It is the trainees main responsibility to manage and execute the project. Each trainee is supported by an advisor from the company and an advisor from the university. A business plan for implementation or marketing of the designed product or process is part of the final deliverables.
This company design project is part of a new R&D effort that intends to set a world record for window integrated PV. The proposed system consists of a reflective between-pane solar shading system combined with bi-facial PV cellstripes in the glazing, where the idea is to harvest electricity through both reflection and absorption, while contributing to a positive indoor environmental quality. This project will develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential added value of such a system (in terms of thermal performance, daylighting and electricity harvesting) and provides ideas about what can be done to further optimize it.
The EngD trainee will be embedded in the Building Performance Group at TU/e
www.tue.nl/buildingperformance.