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This project is funded as a CASE studentship through the Integrated Electronics Manufacturing Research Centre, UK (IEMRC) , EPSRC, Midland Heart and Orbit Heart of England.

Team: Dr Elena Gaura, Dr James Brusey and Ross Wilkins.

Orbit Heart of England and Midland Heart are forward looking Housing Associations currently exploring potential solutions for reducing the carbon footprint of the properties they own and increasing the comfort of the occupiers.

The companies own a variety of housing types, ranging from flats to terraced houses and pride themselves with the care they exercise for their tenants. The properties range in age; some from the 1880's others as recent as the 1970's. The houses have been modernized to a varying degree (double glazing, central heating, loft insulation, etc) and are occupied by a variety of tenants types, ranging from working families to un-employed families to elderly people and also occupants receiving home-care.

Together, the companies own in excess of 40,000 such properties.
Within both companies, a variety of initiatives are now in place towards the dual aim of reducing the housing carbon footprint and, equally, increasing occupants comfort. On the ground, these aims lead to activities such as sample refurbishments of existing properties and also exploring leading edge construction methods for new energy housing, following the passivhaus (passive house) concept.

It is commonly accepted that housing is predominantly designed to meet what the building professionals believe is the need of the building fabric. However, upon implementation, designs do not appear to deliver what was predicted at pre-construction stage. Moreover, there are no tools available to builders, contractors and house owners (like the sponsors here) to help quantify the resulting characteristics of the new buildings and their performance when in use.

To aid and support the above initiatives, measurement and quantification of environmental factors affecting the properties and also qualifying the tenants behaviour is essential. Moreover, quantifying the added value in terms of both comfort and reduction of the energy footprint through insulation measures is key. Funding for sample refurbishments to be executed over the next 2 years has been secured and further funding is sought by the companies here. The options for refurbishment are of two types: full internal insulation and full external insulation.  Both options will be considered in this project. The above studies will further inform the applicability and suitability of proposed energy efficient new builds and evaluate their performance.

Given the above, a thorough survey of the existing housing stock from a viewpoint of the indoors environment and living conditions is essential, together with the development of global quantifiers for a lived in building, in order to establish a baseline and to allow assessment of actual benefits of any refurbishment made.

The novel elements of the research are as follows:

• the production of a bespoke sensing and  information extraction end-to-end system and development of modelling methods leading to the production of "house quantifiers";
• the development of deeply embedded WSN instrumentation to allow assessment of external wall health; challenges here are to do with: the unattended operation of the semi-permanently built-in WSNs and integration of structural monitoring sensing devices fit for purpose in the application; designing the optimal deployment patterns for the deeply embedded system to achieve maximum informational return with minimal hardware configuration; and, development of suitable models for supporting global structural information extraction;
• development of a suite of software and WSN tools dedicated to the wider community of scientists and built environment related manufacturers to allow fast assessment of refurbishments and new builds.