Introduction / mission

Preservation of energy and limitation of the environmental impact while providing a healthy and comfortable indoor and outdoor environment are essential requirements for the built environment.

Highlighted phrase

Enabling meaningful sustainability innovation through building physics and services research 

Organisational profile

The Building Physics & Services (BPS) unit at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) looks beyond energy-neutral and climate-neutral buildings. The aim is to generate new knowledge and to integrate and develop design methods that lead to a sustainable, healthy, comfortable and productive indoor and outdoor environment. The goals is to support truly sustainable habitats with energy generation near the end user, combined with energy storage and smart control technologies and designing and operating buildings and built environments that are sustainable, healthy and comfortable.

This can only be achieved by a holistic approach to tackling the complexity of the problems at hand. The common long-term vision within the BPS research program is articulated as follows: “World-class excellent research in the different disciplines in Building Physics & Services to strongly contribute to a healthy, comfortable and sustainable indoor and outdoor built environment, taking into account economical, ecological and energetic constraints”.

BPS works across six interdepartmental research areas: Building Acoustics, Building Lighting, Building Materials, Building Performance, Building Physics (including Urban Physics and Building Physics of Monuments) and Building Services (including Integral Design)
Research is focused on:
- Building physics: experimental, theoretical and numerical modeling of physical aspects in the indoor and outdoor environment and the building envelope (heat, air and moisture transfer, wind, light and acoustics, building behavior simulation, systems, components and materials)
- The design process related to sustainable buildings.

The mission of the research program is to contribute to research in the built environment in the field of Building Physics & Building Services in several areas:
- scientific: fundamental and applied research; design and testing of solutions in prototypes, models, simulation and systems in practice
- societal: focus on sustainability and comfort in a broad sense
- knowledge dissemination to building designers and practitioners
- information and communication technology: development of modern design tools
- synergy and interaction between education, research and practice.

Research yields scientific results that contribute to the understanding and knowledge of physical behavior of buildings and environments and of Integral Building Design (processes). The BPS research is concerned with the development of tools for the analysis, design and conservation of a high-quality indoor and outdoor environment, in which energy efficiency, health, comfort and sustainability are key research topics. The program also provides knowledge to the building industry and engineering consultancy firms.

Research is organized as a network of collaborators within a common BPS research program with a single strategic mission. Synergy between research groups is essential to cover the interdisciplinary challenges that arise from the complexity of the built environment. In recent years, BPS has increasingly taken a leading role in energy, health and sustainability related programs, assuming roles in the Eindhoven Energy Institute, the 4TU (4l Universities of Technology) Focus point ‘Bouw’ (Built Environment) and the International Urban Physics Research Schools.