Dr Deng received a PhD degree in the sustainable built environment from the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is also a certified passive house designer with more than 10 years’ experience in the industry, he also serves as a standing council member of the Ningbo Civil & Architecture Society. Prior to joining UNNC in 2013, he was a Lead Consultant/Technical Manager in the Eco-city Research Center, Siemens Corporate Technology, and provided integrated solutions to build a low-carbon eco-city. His research and teaching experience spans the field of sustainable architecture design and architectural engineering design. Over the past four years, he has been focusing on building prototyping research.
Building prototyping classifies buildings with parameters such as building sizes, building styles, and construction materials. Each geographical region can contain one or more typical prototype buildings, which mirror all the buildings of this type in that region. These prototypes represent, evaluate and predict the energy performance of building stock.
The geometric characteristics of buildings in different regions can be influenced by local contextual conditions (e.g., climate, culture, building regulations). Buildings constructed in the same timeframe usually tend to have similar thermal characteristics since they have to meet the building regulations issued by the government. Energy analysis and associated optimised technological systems with these prototypes can help governments, investors, developers, and designers, to evaluate various energy retrofit plans for building stock rather than on the basis of individual buildings.
Building prototyping has regularly been used in building performance analyses with statistically feasible prototyping models. So far, they have investigated and identified prototypes for low-rise office buildings in Shanghai, and residential buildings in Ningbo and Cixi, as well as proposing optimised retrofit strategies for achieving an energy/carbon reduction target at minimum cost. In the year of 2020, they received 200,000 RMB research funding from Ningbo Commonweal Grant.
Another area of Dr Deng’s research focuses on sustainable eco-city development. In 2019, he and his colleague published a book titled “Eco Development in China: Cities, Communities and Buildings”, which offers a comprehensive introduction to eco-development in China, as well as a useful reference for future projects around the world over the decades.
Over the past three years, Dr Wu Deng has published 19 journal articles and more than half of these have been published in JCR Q1 journals, such as Energy Conversion and Management, Building and Environment, Energy and Buildings, and Cities. He has secured over two million research grants during his time in the UNNC.
As the new Director of CSET, he is committed to making the Centre an inclusive platform for research collaboration and sharing resources to support cross-disciplinary research for a wider deployment of sustainable energy technologies.