NUIG project to enhance energy performance of buildings
© Olearys

NUIG project to enhance energy performance of buildings

NUI Galway’s (NUIG) Informatics Research Unit for Sustainable Engineering (IRUSE) in the College of Engineering and Informatics is to reduce the gap in the energy performance of buildings.

IRUSE’s research focuses on better predicting environmental conditions in buildings, ensuring healthy, comfortable and productive indoor environments, and reducing building energy consumption at the same time.

Built to Specifications (Built2Spec), a four-year €5.5m Horizon 2020-funded project involving 20 European partners, seeks to reduce the gap between a building’s designed and as-built energy performance. To do this, the project will put a new set of technological advances for self-inspection checks and quality assurance measures into the hands of construction professionals.

NUIG researchers, Dr Marcus Keane and Dr Magdalena Hajdukiewicz from IRUSE are leading the Work Package 4 of the Built2Spec project. Work Package 4 will investigate smart materials, imagery techniques and building information modelling as inspection and quality multipliers.

Commenting on the project, Hajdukiewicz said: “The Built2Spec project and collaboration with companies such as Oran Pre-Cast allow our research to be applied to real buildings to tackle the problems of quality checks during the construction, as well as energy efficiency and indoor environmental conditions of operating buildings.”

Built2Spec will expand upon a cloud-based construction support platform, conceived following the most advanced integrated design and delivery framework for the building sector, and hosting applications that facilitate worksite activities and quality compliance by putting knowledge in the hands of contractors.

The Built2Spec platform will be integrated into the operations of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) contractors, large construction firms, and end user clients directly within the consortium and work programme activities, assuring systematic and scientific performance measures, feedback and powerful exploitation and dissemination strategies.