“Designing efficiently healthy, comfortable indoor environments with maximum use of renewable energy makes it necessary to start from human needs and work up to the neighborhood level.”

Wim Zeiler is a Full Professor and Chair of Building Services at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His areas of expertise include renewable energy in the built environment, integral design, building services and building technology. His current research focuses on integral design of efficient sustainable solution to provide and comfortable and healthy indoor environment.  His research on design methods takes a morphological approach to structure the design process whilst also using morphological charts and morphological overviews to analyse the conceptual building design process. Traditionally, energy supply in electricity and gas networks is organized top-down and has to cope with decentralized renewable energy production. Energy consumption can be predicted reasonably well at macro level, and large power plants pre-schedule their power generation based on this.

However, an increasing share of decentralized energy generation at micro level introduces growing complexities and uncertainties that have to be factored in operations. Using the flexibility within energy generation, distribution infrastructure, renewable energy sources and the built environment is the ultimate sustainable strategy. New process control strategies are needed for improving the energy interaction within the building, its environment and the energy infrastructure by effectively incorporating the occupant’s behavior: A bottom-up approach for system integration of energy infrastructures is required to support energy flexibility. Another research line is on school ventilation. Currently, indoor air quality and thermal comfort in nearly 80% of schools are not good enough for optimal learning conditions.

Wim Zeiler studied Mechanical Engineering (Design and construction; Methodical Design) at the Technische Universiteit Twente (University of Twente). In 1983, he started work at a building services contracting company, in which he currently holds the position of building services technology specialist.

He has worked as a visiting assistant professor at the faculty of Architecture of the TU Delft (2000-2003). He has been a member of the board of TVVL (Dutch Society for Building Services in the Built Environment), chairman of the department of Electro-technology of TVVL and he is member of the board of advice of ISSO (Dutch society for stimulation of research on building services in the Netherlands). He received the B.J. Max price of TVVL in 1993 and in 2009 he was honoured with their lifetime achievement award the Gold medal. In 2014 he received the REHVA professional science award.