Dealing with climate change has become inevitable when making long term decisions.

The National Research Council (NRC) Canada is conducting a project on thermal retrofits of important heritage buildings in Ottawa. The Building Physics Group has been invited to collaborate in this project given its expertise in this research domain.

Flanders has around 1,4 million apartments, more than half of them must be renovated in the short or medium term.

Doctoral dissertation Elisa Van Kenhove

The study is intended to gain insight on approaches towards making building stock energy efficient and along with making the adjacent transport system sustainable in relation the buildings.

Up to now, three strategies have already been used to manage rain penetration through the building envelope: mass buffering, face-sealed or perfect barrier principle and rainscreen or drained principle.

The new generation of residential ventilation systems, Demand Controlled Ventilation (DCV) systems, are systems that do not supply the nominal airflow continuously but are controlled by CO2 or humidity sensors in order to save energy.

With the building sector being a substantial contributor in the European energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, there is a growing awareness of the need to renovate the existing building stock.

With the building sector being a substantial contributor in the European energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, there is a growing awareness of the need to renovate the existing building stock.

Ghent University took part in the Solar Decathlon Europe 2019 competition with the energy-efficient and sustainable concept 'The Mobble'. This is a flexible building block that introduces a new way of building and living and stands for 'Modular Building Block'. The 'Mobble on the move' project is a follow-up to this successful participation, which was awarded with 5 prizes, including the first prize for Engineering & Construction.

Buildings have an enormous impact on our environment and are responsible for a large share of the primary energy use and CO2-emissions.

Bouwunie, Odisee university college, VDAB and Ghent University are working together to develop a mobile unit within the open call circular economy of Flanders Circular.

Flanders has around 1,4 million apartments, more than half of them must be renovated in the short or medium term.

Belgium has never had a national architecture museum or architecture center. At least since the mid-1980s, however, a diffuse landscape emerged of small and mid-sized platforms - organizations as well as gallery spaces - that put architecture on display.

Triple-A is an Interreg 2 Seas project under the programme priority “Low carbon technologies”.

Doctoral dissertation Marc Delghust

Thermal bridges can have an important impact on the energy performance of buildings. Therefore, in Belgium, a pragmatic approach was developed to take construction nodes into account in the official energy performance assessment of buildings.

hybridGEOTABS is a four year European research and innovation project that brought together a transdisciplinary team of 12 partners including SMEs, large industry and research institutes from various EU countries.

The ECO-Life project demonstrates the development of the zero-carbon social housing neighbourhood “Venning” in Kortrijk, from the conceptual phase to the first operational years. The Building Physics research group analyses the actual energy performance of the dwellings during construction works and during occupation.

Each building has a large number of different construction nodes (e.g. wall-roof junctions) and many of those are unique, being detailed specifically for that building.

Ghent University is part of the funded research project on retrofitting SME buildings. Within this project specific guidelines will be developed for the renovation of Industrial complexes and offices of SME’s. The consortium consists of Ghent University, Odisee, University of Antwerp, BBRI and KUL. The project is scheduled from 2016 till 2018, and Ghent University will work on the airtightness of building envelope interfaces.

Infrared thermography (IRT) is a non-destructive evaluation technique for the building envelope. By the visualisation of surface temperatures, it is possible to detect construction deficiencies e.g. thermal bridges, moisture problems, incomplete insulation of cavity walls etc. in a fast way in-situ.

Doctoral dissertation Klaas Calle

In 2012 Duco Ventilation & Sun Control looked for support for the integration of its (new) ventilation components in an automatic natural/hybrid ventilation system.

The research group building physics and Indoor Climate of HoGent and the research group of building physics of UGent started in 2012 the IWT-TETRA project “Optimisation and cost management of zero-energy social massive and passive houses”, funded by the Institute for the Promotion of Innovations through Science and Technology in Flanders.

Although moisture is one of the leading factors for building damage, water infiltration is barely taken into account in the current methods to evaluate a building skin.

The EPICOOL-project, funded by the Brussels Institute for Environmental Protection, started in 2009. The project consortium took on the EPB calculation method for cooling and overheating.

Retrofit cavity wall insulation (CWI) has great potential for reducing the energy use in Flemish houses. This is due to the reduced complexity and costs of the procedure compared to interior and exterior retrofit wall insulation and to the vast amount of non-insulated cavity-walls in Flanders.

The purpose of the Proeftuin is to stimulate scalable and reproducible renovation concepts in order to obtain affordable building solutions. Research is being carried out on the basis of real renovation projects. The research unit Building Physics is a partner in three Proeftuin projects.

Doctoral dissertation Kim Goethals

Today, ETICS, cavity-filling and interior insulation are popular renovation measures. However,these methods are typically used on a low-scale level and involves in-situ work.

Doctoral dissertation Jelle Laverge

How accurately do official energy performance calculations assess the real energy use in high-performance houses? This question was investigated in a statistical study commissioned by the Flemish Energy Agency (VEA), analysing data on 537 dwellings: their building envelope and system characteristics and calculated energy performance reported in the Energy Performance of Buildings (EPB) database, the energy use collected by the energy utilities and socio-demographic and behavioural data from surveys of the inhabitants.