Description

The Sustainable Building Design (SBD) Lab is a research lab of the Faculty of Applied Science of Liege University. The SBD Lab focuses its activities around design decision support of high-performance buildings and user-centered advanced facades.

The lab is focused on integrative sustainable design and performance monitoring, addressing users’ interaction in relation to energy efficiency, thermal comfort, and indoor environmental quality. The overarching goal is promoting energy efficiency, a positive impact-built environment, and human comfort and health within buildings.

As part of the Department of Urban Environmental Engineering (UEE) in the Faculty of Applied Sciences (FSA), the lab members provide education and conduct scientific research in building physics and building technology related to building design. The main areas of interest are high-performance building design, facade design, structural design, climate design, and computational design, with a strong focus on sustainability.

With our wide range of building performance simulation software, we perform computational modeling and simulation for optimizing design and renovations of high-performance buildings. Also, the laboratory is equipped with various data acquisition/logging systems for temperature, humidity, airflow, turbulence, illumination intensity, carbon dioxide emissions, envelope air tightness (blower door), and infrared cameras. The lab members can monitor thermal comfort, indoor air quality, and the main influencing factors on an occupant’s sense of comfort, following the international standard ISO 7730, which combines all parameters in the PMV/PPD measurement.