Building Performance aims to optimize energy use and indoor environment during design and operation of new and existing buildings, to arrive at sustainable, healthy, productive and/or comfortable buildings.

Increasing sustainability by optimizing energy use and indoor environmental quality

Building Performance (BP) is a research group of the Building Physics and Services (BPS) unit at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). The group’s aim is to contribute to achieving a sustainable, energy-positive built environment with indoor environmental quality optimized for health, comfort and/or productivity.
This requires a multi-scale / multi-physics and trans-disciplinary approach that addresses technological solutions for energy generation, storage, distribution and demand reduction, and integrates and optimizes these in design, construction and operation of new and existing buildings. A performance-based perspective is at the center of these activities, providing opportunities for informed decision-making in the development of designs, products and services that foster the sustainability transition.

Research and teaching is focused on:

• Computational building performance simulation as an enabling technology in this context
• Optimization of indoor environmental quality for health, comfort and/or productivity.

Although the building industry is one of the most important industrial and economic sectors, influencing the quality of life and the environment, planners and property developers pay relatively little attention during the design phase to the life-cycle cost of owning and operating buildings.
For building design, construction, operation, maintenance and management activities, there is an urgent need for the integration of ‘generally applicable’ and ‘generally accepted’ methods and tools, for various applications, each having various levels of complexity and/or various types of end-users.

Increasingly, computer-based models (programs) are employed to aid in the design, operation, or management decision-making process. Development, evaluation, ways of dealing with uncertainties and practical use of the models and programs is therefore increasingly important. Building performance is closely involved in the TU/e Strategic Area Energy and in the TU/e Smart Cities Center program.