The Bartlett’s Dr Kostas Grigoriadis Awarded UCL Research Funding

The Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) is part of UCL’s Innovation and Enterprise funding. The funding is provided by Research England to strengthen UCL’s engagement with businesses, charities, government and other organisations. It can be used to support a broad range of knowledge exchange projects.

The funded project is a collaboration between Dr Kostas Grigoriadis from The Bartlett School of Architecture, Dr Samuel Stamp from the Institute of Environmental Design and Engineering at UCL and industrial partners Interface Facade Engineering. The team were awarded £30,000 to put toward proof of concept and early stage commercialisation of their project.

It addresses the problem of heat loss in buildings and the resulting carbon emissions. The built environment currently contributes 40% of the UK’s carbon emissions, and 66% of building emissions are currently caused by heating, predominantly via fossil fuel heating systems. Typical British homes lose up to a third of their heat through the roof, walls, floor and windows - a significant concern both for our environmental impact and for people’s energy bills.

Looking deeper into the problem, Dr Grigoriadis and his colleagues found that metal substructures account for up to 50% of the heat loss in these components, as a result of thermal bridging, where heat is transferred through metal connecting elements that link facade panels to building floors. In response, their research seeks to develop a new class of functionally graded metal facade connectors with minimal thermal conductivity, resulting in reduced heat losses.

They will perform digital and full-scale physical heat flow tests to establish the percentage of heat loss minimisation and corresponding energy savings. The research project will model digital construction details of two test cases of building envelope build - and perform 2D and 3D CFD Thermtest heat loss analyses. The team will also construct full scale mock-ups of the test cases at UCL’s Here East environmental chamber and take temperature and heat flux measurements, comparing the values for conventional and functionally graded bracketry. The intention is to solve the problem of thermal bridging in construction, and deliver energy savings in a scalable and economical way.

Dr Kostas Grigoriadis is an Associate Professor in Architecture, and the Co-Director for Architecture MArch (ARB/RIBA Part 2). He studied architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, followed by a Master's degree in Architecture and Urbanism at the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory (DRL). He has worked for Foster + Partners and Populous in London and held a Visiting Lectureship at the Royal College of Art where he also completed a PhD in Architecture by Project (in June 2017) on multi-material design methodologies. In 2018 he won the RIBA President’s Award for Design and Technical Research and in 2019 he was awarded the inaugural Google R+D in the Built Environment Fellowship.

More information

• Find out more about Innovation and Enterprise funding
• Visit Dr Kostas Grigoriadis’ profile

Image: Thermal image of the north facade of the Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children, showing the heat losses through the aluminium mullions. Image by Dr Samuel Stamp and Dr Kostas Grigoriadis.