PhD Project: Investigation of energy flows in thermally activated building constructions

The PhD project is affiliated with the research project “Activating the Building Construction for Building Environmental Control” financed by the Danish Council for Strategic Research, The Programme Commission for Sustainable Energy and Environment. The overall scope of the project is to activate the building construction in order to develop a building system which has the capability to dynamically adjust physical properties and energetic performance according to changing demands, indoor/outdoor conditions and energy availability (e.g. access and price). This ability could pertain to energy capture, energy transport, energy storage, energy shifting and reduction of peak load as well as utilization of renewable energy sources. Furthermore, the project wants to strengthen the relations and research cooperation between key research groups in Denmark and China within the area of energy efficiency in buildings.



This PhD project, which is one of five affiliated with the research project (the others are placed at the Danish Technical University and Tsinghua University, China), aims at developing new methods for analysis and simulation of energy flows in activated building constructions in low energy buildings in order to be able to investigate the possibilities for transferring heating-cooling demand to night-time and none peak hours or between different zones in a buildings. Additionally, the acceptable time-frame for buildings to be disconnected from the energy grid should be investigated along with how much the peak load can be reduced by activating the building mass.