Are you eager to help shape sustainable cities and communities, improve health and well-being, and tackle climate challenges through the built environment? Join TU/e’s Building Lighting group as an EngD trainee and contribute to an innovative facade solution to reduce overheating while ensuring daylight for human comfort and health!
InformationTo prevent overheating, buildings often use well-insulated facades while glass facades ensure daylight penetration for human health and comfort. A new semitransparent, well-insulated sandwich element with integrated optical fibers has been developed to combine both benefits. The main challenge of the EngD trainee position is to assess to what extent the innovative façade element meets the intended goals. These investigations will take place at three study sites in the Netherlands.
The TU/e Department of the Built Environment offers you a EngD trainee position to follow a two-year post-master technological designer program (Smart Buildings & Cities; SBC). After successfully completing all requirements, trainees are awarded the EngD degree (Engineering Doctor), formerly known as PDEng (Professional Doctorate in Engineering). 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 the individual design project in collaboration with a company. It is the trainee’s 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.
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 EngD trainee will be embedded in the Building Lighting group within the TU/e’s Department of the Built Environment. The company involved in this project is Zospeum, a Dutch company that developed a new translucent insulated façade element. This work is part of the larger OPZuid project, where a consortium works on (1) improving the façade solution, (2) setting up a production line with automated optical fiber integration, (3) producing the façade elements for the three test sites, and (4) obtaining certifications such as LCA and a materials passport.
The company project focuses on the key challenge: assessing how well the innovative façade element achieves its goals - reducing overheating (and thus HVAC energy use) while allowing daylight penetration. As an EngD trainee, you will design and execute measurement campaigns at three Dutch sites: a prefab residential building, utility building, and a renovation project. The measurement campaigns will cover thermal performance, daylighting, and energy consumption inside and outside the façades. After analyzing the collected data, you will share insights with the project consortium and publish findings in (scientific) publications.