E-2461 PHD STUDENT IN BUILDING ENERGY MODELLING AND PROSPECTIVE LIFE CYCLE

at  Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology LIST

DESCRIPTION

With increasing urbanisation, cities and buildings will need to drastically improve their environmental performance. Policy-makers, building stakeholders, citizens, etc., need to advance mitigation and adaptation interventions and adopt tailored de-carbonisation strategies consistent with political, climatic, and socio-demographic contexts. Long-term solutions for more climate-neutral cities are emerging, however many knowledge gaps on urban climate actions are still to be addressed. For example, there is still little understanding of the effect of mitigation actions at the urban level (e.g., green infrastructure, water features, etc.) and the impact of actions by homeowners (e.g., green roofs, insulation, cooling systems, etc.) on the urban climate at street or district level.
You will carry out this PhD in the framework of the project CHIASMUS ("Climate-based Hybrid and locally Informed Adaptive Strategies from Modelling of Urban building Stock"), where he/she will conduct a prospective life cycle assessment (pLCA) study to quantify the impacts linked with building performances under current and future climate conditions (up to the horizon 2050). Urban nature-based solutions will be considered among the possible strategies for climate adaptation. The calculation of the net environmental benefits of the implementation of these solutions will be supported by the NBenefit$ tool developed by LIST, which underpins a system dynamics model (SDM) that combines ecosystem (dis)services with LCA.
It is foreseen to conduct the pLCA study using the Brightway software package for LCA.
You will be enrolled at the University of Luxembourg.
You will receive inputs concerning physics-based and data-driven building energy modelling, respectively from the University of Antwerpen and the University of Louvain, both partners of the project. The future climate scenarios will be generated by a third partner.
The prospective scenarios will be complemented by regional and time variability assessment to perform sensitivity analysis. In addition, the uncertainty of the prospective LCA results will be quantified.
You will also travel for short periods to the two Universities partners of the project.

LANGUAGE SKILLS

Flawless knowledge of English (both spoken and written) is required.
Knowledge of German and/or French and/or Luxembourgish is considered as an asset.

EDUCATION

Master

Please refer the Job description for details