Q. Where did you grow up and study?
I grew up in Upper Hutt with family in the engineering and construction trades. I studied physics and maths at Victoria University of Wellington. I initially undertook an engineering intermediate year but quite enjoyed how the physical sciences get to the bottom of things, so I switched to that as a pathway.
Maths was a particularly strong suit of mine and formed a natural extension to studying physics. This gave me exposure to a lot of interesting problem-solving techniques, including various numerical methods, which really paid off a few years down the track when I started working at BRANZ.
Q. What’s your work history pre-BRANZ and now at BRANZ?
While studying, I got involved in summer work at BRANZ installing instrumentation in the rebates on 200 double-glazed windows for a research project on edge seal durability. I was undertaking data analysis work for this project when the leaky building crisis emerged, so I ended up being thrust into the building of the weathertightness test structure.
At the same time, I was completing my undergraduate studies and BRANZ offered me a full-time role and supported further study. As part of this, I built my own hygrothermal model for a summer project, which resulted in me being sent over to the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics in Germany.
The next few years were spent adding submodels into WUFI software for different physical processes. This was great fun – performing experiments in the labs and then building models to simulate what we observed.
While general users do not have access to all this work, results of the challenging work we undertook during the weathertightness research programme measuring airflow rates in ventilated cavities is available.
Q. What are the chief issues concerning the industry?
One of the big challenges I see in the next few years is how we respond to the current state of much of our building stock. There is progress needed for new builds, which will happen, but the bigger challenge is what already exists. There are several developments in this space, and assessing what a building is likely to achieve in practice is critical to good outcomes. From the heating perspective, this is relatively straightforward, but as always, the devil lies in the detail.
The overheating side is not as simple, and the industry will need support to avoid unintentionally building homes that overheat. The last thing we need to happen is that efforts to improve buildings lose public support due to problems that could be solved at the design stage.
Q. Do you see your work having a direct impact on our building systems?
I see what I do as directly supporting the evidence base needed for improving the building system. Transparency, rigour and openness are key attributes of supporting change, and I think having the scientific freedom to understand the issues, while being independent of any particular methodology, is a great advantage of working at BRANZ. What we do in coming years to support the industry will have a direct positive impact on the lives of New Zealanders. To that end, education is paramount – I’m helping by supervising the next generation to come through. We’ve had some really driven master’s and PhD students at BRANZ who have all been great to mentor.
Over the coming years, NZ Inc will really need to step up education efforts as we seek to create buildings that perform better. The opportunities for unintended consequences increase, and only by continuing education can we avoid expensive failures down the road.
One of the most valuable advances we could make is to break down workflow challenges so that designers can get rapid feedback on the effects that design changes are having on the performance of the building.
Q. What are the most challenging aspects of your job and the most satisfying?
One of the most challenging is time – experiments can take a while, but they are a key part of underpinning any modelling exercise to generalise results. This gives a real rigour to what we do. It is easy to get a computer to produce thousands of results – ensuring they are reasonably representative of reality is another challenge altogether.
Basing decisions off purely model-based exercises is fraught with challenges if all the inputs, assumptions and limitations are not understood. This is where peer review of research is critical – even more so in an age where opinion gets presented as fact.