Paul Kenny, a Director of the UCD Energy Research Group and programme coordinator for the BSc in Architectural Science has one of only a handful of the artificial skies that exist in Europe.
Unusually for a lecturer in architecture, Paul is an engineer by profession. He has always been busy inventing and designing. So, when it came to college, he pursued a degree in mechanical engineering.
He started his career with Ove Arup Engineers in London where he was involved in the extension to the National Gallery Sainsbury Wing. And despite the excitement of occasional police escorts and roofs being blown off by huge extractor fans, he returned to academia to complete his masters at Cranfield University in the UK before joining UCD’s Energy Research Group.
Based in the UCD School of Architecture, Landscape and Civil Engineering, the Energy Research Group is one of the busiest in terms of commercial research and for many years it has successfully attained significant amounts of research funding, the majority of which is competitively obtained from within EC research and support action programmes.
Recently, the Group has undertaken projects with financial support from European Commission Directorate Generals Research and Transport & Energy, as well as a significant number of Irish public and private agencies and firms. The group has also become one of the leading experts on energy conservation and was involved with many of the earliest attempts to realise efficient buildings. The team would sit between the architect and engineer and act as “strategy catalyst”. “It was a great mix of the real world while advancing a research agenda,” explains Paul.
Five years’ ago Paul reformatted a number of course modules in order to give students a stronger environmental agenda and working with colleagues in mechanical engineering he developed a postgraduate programme which currently has three PhD students and five postgraduates engaged in research masters. UCD ERG also runs a number of CPD or continuing professional development programmes for some of the larger architectural practices.
This year the group will be hosting the 25th anniversary conference of the Passive and Low Energy Architecture at UCD with a theme of “Towards Zero Energy Building” and Paul is chair of the Technical Committee.
Other countries such as Germany, Austria and Canada are already advanced in pursuing a zero carbon building policy but Ireland is still lagging. Yet buildings consume about 40 per cent of all the energy while Ireland is one of the most energy import dependent countries in the EU. The UCD Energy Research Group was instrumental in supporting and developing guidelines for the new building energy regulations and the European Performance of Buildings Directive ratings method in Ireland known as DEAP and it also provides training to architects.
‘We need to go further,” says Paul. “Rather than
only focusing money and research on energy
supply we also need to target demand.” This
idea is strongly supported by the Minister for
Energy and Communications, Eamon Ryan.
Paul warns that there is a danger in changing standards without adequate research. The downside became apparent during the last oil crisis in the 1970s when ventilation standards in homes changed with a consequent rise in asthma and bronchitis. Today, many of the materials used in our homes are synthetic and can be harmful if not used correctly. Something which, according to Paul, highlights the need to be acutely aware of any potential health problems associated with materials used in the structures and the overall design of the structures themselves.
Paul’s own research focuses on structures and daylight. “We now know there is a third ganglion cell in the eye apart from rods and cones. It is not so much visual but appears to be linked to our physiological state via the pituitary gland and is triggered by light at 455 to 475 nm on the light spectrum in particular,” explains Paul.
“Interestingly this corresponds to the colour of sky blue. We also know from the experiences of pilots, astronauts and shift workers that lack of daylight and interference in our circadian rhythm can have serious health implications from SAD to cancer. So it is important to people’s well-being that buildings allow occupants to be exposed to full spectrum light. Since we spend almost 90% of our lives indoors, it is crucially important that our buildings are designed for well-being and for energy efficiency.”
As part of his research, Paul will often be found
on top of the Architecture Building or indeed
on top of the Sugar Loaf photographing the
sky with a fish-eye photo lens attached to a
scientific camera. The camera takes a shot every
five seconds and Paul uses these to record a
time series of skies which he can then feed into
a database which plugs into his artificial sky.
“The sky which is made up of 145 individual CFL lamps controlled by a computer as well as a theatrical spotlight to mimic the sun is in the UCD Urban Institute. This means that UCD will be one of the first locations where architects will be able to come in and carry out studies under recorded and repeatable real sky sequences.”
On the day of our interview Paul and his research student Darragh are running a new programme and we can see the simulated impact of shadows running across a building as clouds pass overhead. He is now in the process of building a monitoring platform on the roof and adopting an outdoor camera which will allow him to record daylight and solar radiation 24/7. That data will be made freely available on a website for others researchers to use. Researchers in Canada, France and the UK are also working on advancing climate based daylight modeling and Paul is hopeful that they should be able to work together collaboratively.
If Paul has his way we will all be sitting in offices and homes with a view of the sky through large windows. How nice would that be?