Postdoctoral Researcher Thermal/Visual Comfort of Advanced Building Envelope System

The Professorship of Architecture and Building Systems (A/S) is an interdisciplinary team of researchers focusing on active and passive systems for the energy supply and climate control of buildings. In 2023, we opened our new Zero Carbon Building Systems Lab, an exceptional experimental space for advancing research and teaching. Using the lab, the group is engaged in a 18-month research and innovation project for an advanced façade system, which is currently launched as a product by the ETH spinoff Solskin.

The position is available from October 2024. The Project duration is 18 months.

Solskin is a climate-adaptive building envelope system leveraging movable photovoltaic (PV) panels to simultaneously provide renewable electricity generation and decrease the building energy needs through smart shading. In particular, when placed in front of glazed surfaces, the movable panels influence the thermal and visual indoor conditions and the building’s energy efficiency. This introduces a complex optimization problem, where one wants to maximize the building’s energy efficiency while meeting the occupants’ expectations. The project will focus on developing and implementing AI-based controls to allow the façade to adapt to different buildings and users to balance the thermal and visual comfort of the occupants, the building’s energy efficiency, and the electricity production in real-time. A key ingredient to the development of AI-based controls is the understanding and analysis of how users in the building perceive the system, especially regarding thermal and visual comfort, and how the system responds to these user requirements.

Your role in this project will be to analyse visual and thermal comfort of the façade system based on the results of field studies/measurements at the Zero Carbon Building Systems Lab (ZCBS), which features the latest Solskin prototype, involving user feedback and understanding the impact of Solskin on the comfort of building occupants. For this, you will be collaborating directly with a postdoctoral researcher who is developing the AI-based controls and the Solskin spin-off team, which is providing the hardware. Your work also encompasses the development of a virtual environment to be able to simulate different Solskin systems and understand their impact beyond the specificities of ZCBS. Hence, field studies will be conducted both with simulated systems and with physical installation at ZCBS.

Key Responsibilities:

• Literature review to identify key thermal and visual comfort parameters
• Definition of critical parameters to monitor, setup of sensor environment together with lab technical team
• Preparing the field studies and designing surveys
• Conducting the pre-study and the full-scale field study, overall including approximately 50 participants
• Analysing and visualizing the results by combining data from surveys and sensor measurements
• Preparing reports for the project partners and Innosuisse

In general, doctoral / postdoctoralresearchers at ETH Zurich have a full-time employment. A part-time employment may only be considered in exceptional cases (e.g. child- or familycare, other projects or employment)

We are looking for highly motivated and passionate candidates with a PhD in architecture, architectural engineering or engineering and previous experience in lab work, ideally with industry, with the following characteristics:

• Knowledge and methodological skills in thermal/visual comfort analysis, previous experience in conducting field studies with participants
• Experience in developing/using VR technology or similar or comparable computational skills that will allow a fast uptake
• Excellent communication skills in English and, ideally, in German, both written and spoken
• Interest and passion in bridging research and application and interacting with a dynamic spin-off environment

In addition to a competitive salary and extensive opportunities for further training, we offer an attractive and international environment in which we work together on one of the greatest challenges of our time: how to address climate change and its impact on the built environment. As an international and multi-disciplinary research group based in Zurich and Singapore we work on large and small research projects in different geographical and socio-economic contexts, at the interface of architecture, engineering and computation. For this project you will be embedded in a dynamic spin-off environment working on an exceptional project to be implemented at scale.