4-year Engineering Doctorate (EngD) studentship in Environmental Technology

School of Engineering and Design

Brunel University

Our prestigious 4-year Engineering Doctorate (EngD) programme in Environmental Technology is sponsored by the EPSRC. The programme offers environmentally focussed research, in an industrial setting, along with personal and professional development to research engineers whilst they study towards their Doctorate.

Research Project: Advanced PV integration for decentralized power supply for buildings.
Photovoltaics are one of the most promising technologies to deliver clean, high-grade energy locally to buildings and help move society away from fossil fuel dependency and towards effective decentralised renewable energy generation. To this end, the UK Government has recently introduced favourable feed-in tariffs which should give further impetus to the proliferation of this technology. However, in order to support the uptake of PV in the built environment and to full take advantage of this opportunity, there is a strong need to create a suitable interface with the construction industry and its current practices and procedures.

The proposed research aims to develop the processes required to interface with designers and other specialists at the various design stages. The project will tackle key aspects in several areas which bridge the gap between the available products and their successful application in the built environment. This involves developing novel techniques to integrate PVs – including new thin film technologies – into building envelopes (both new builds and retrofitting). It also includes assessing the feasibility of a range of systems from small-scale (e.g. assessing the benefits of solar tracking and concentration) and hybrid systems (e.g. heat pumps and energy stores) to large scale PV integration with ‘master-plans’ and infrastructure design.

Energy and the environment is a strong research area in the School of Engineering and Design at Brunel University, with current activities covering the distributed generation of energy through to the efficient utilisation of energy and the use of renewable resources. BDSP Partnership is one of the few SME building services and environmental engineering consultancies that actively pursues and participates in research projects in renewable energy and software development.

Entry Requirements:
Applicants should have or expect to obtain a 2:1 or 1st class degree and/or an MSc in mechanical, sustainable energy and built environment engineering or related disciplines. The ideal candidate will have experience in integrated energy system design and experimental research, and have a good theoretical and practical knowledge of energy system analysis and data acquisition. Experience with relevant computer simulation software, programming and techniques such as ray-tracing (Radiance), computational fluid dynamics, and dynamic process modelling would be an advantage.