Ljubomir “Lubo” Jankovic has spent nearly four decades focusing on how environmental design of buildings can be improved using dynamic simulation, instrumental performance monitoring and utilisation of bio-based materials.
In 2024 he was appointed as Professor of Energy and Buildings at Energy House Labs, an experimental research facility at the University of Salford, UK, with a wide research agenda on improving building energy performance and reducing carbon emissions. Between 2018 and 2024, he held a position of Professor of Advanced Building Design at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, where he led Zero Carbon Lab and was Director of a university-wide transdisciplinary Centre for Future Societies Research. Previously, he was Professor of Zero Carbon Design at Birmingham City University, UK, where he founded a Master’s programme on Zero Carbon Architecture and Retrofit Design. He also taught Behaviour of Complex Systems and Virtual Reality at the University of Birmingham and Embracing Complexity in Science and Society at the Universities of Liverpool and Salford. He has been a mentor of several PhD dissertations and a PhD Examiner in Spain, India, Pakistan and the UK.
His work on Designing Zero Carbon Buildings has contributed to the industry with monographs published in 2012, 2017, and 2024. His outputs in sustainable retrofitting are based on design and experimental performance evaluation and are widely cited. His work on reducing simulation performance gap has earned him a unique reputation in industry in designing buildings with hempcrete as a construction material. His work on changing the culture of building simulation from top-down to self-organised bottom-up approaches to computational fluid dynamics has introduced new thinking into industry. And his work on non-invasive experimental measurement of building physics properties has introduced a new method for quality control of building retrofit. Lubo’s invention of a new predictive control method for building heating and cooling utilises a compact genetic algorithm for machine learning of building physics properties, runs on a pocket size device and has a 30% energy reduction potential. The above outputs are in the context of £10+million of research grant funding, with circa 160 publications and over 1000 citations.
Lubo is a founding Director of two innovation companies pioneering sustainability solution for buildings and has worked as a consultant in over 50 engineering projects, delivering numerous solutions for industry. This included improving thermal comfort in buildings and resolving simulation performance gap occurring in buildings built from hemp-lime bio-composite materials, and on designing thermal performance of commercial buildings built from that material.
He graduated as a Dipl. Ing. (now an MSc) from the University of Belgrade and was awarded a PhD from the University of Birmingham, both in Mechanical Engineering, having defended his Doctoral Thesis on Solar Energy Monitoring, Control and Analysis in Buildings. He is a UK Chartered (Licensed) Engineer, a member of CIBSE, a Member of ASHRAE, a Fellow of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers, and a Fellow of the International Building Performance Simulation Association. His Society activities included various chapter roles, including positions of President of ASHRAE UK London and Southeast Chapter and Vice-President of ASHRAE UK Chapter.
Lubo is also an on-going student of applied fluid dynamics, pursued through his role as a certified water ski instructor and a passionate water skier.
Mitigation of overheating using air to water heat pumps in reversed mode (Intermediate/Advanced)
Recommended audience: ASHRAE members, students, engineers, architects, property developers, building stakeholders, policy makers, etc.
Experiments with building overheating under controlled conditions (Intermediate/Advanced)
Recommended audience: ASHRAE members, students, engineers, architects, property developers, building stakeholders, policy makers, etc.
Designing Resilience of the Built Environment to Extreme Weather Events (Intermediate/Advanced)
Built environment comprises of a multitude of complex networks of buildings and processes in and between buildings. The lecture investigates resilience design on three different levels: the building, the site, and the region. The building resilience design is studied using multi-objective optimization of a recently completed Passivhaus retrofit, under four different climate years: current, 2030, 2050, and 2080. The site resilience design is studied based on a balance between incoming solar radiation and evaporative cooling from transpiration of plants to mitigate heat island effect. The regional resilience design is studied using a network model, considering connectivity, information capacity, and the ability to reconfigure. A common denominator found between these three aspects is a degree of system redundancy. Thus, a provision for adaptable building thermal insulation, a provision for adaptable green areas, and a provision for adaptable connectivity are the ingredients for resilient designs on these three respective levels. The findings increase our understanding of practical issues and implications for the resilience design of the built environment under extreme weather events. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches discussed in the lecture provides practical guidance for designers and policy makers.
Recommended audience: ASHRAE members, students, engineers, architects, property developers, building stakeholders, policy makers, etc.
How can we be sure that we get what it says on the tin? (Intermediate)
Buildings contribute to nearly 30% of global carbon dioxide emissions, making a significant impact on climate change. Despite advanced design methods, such as those based on dynamic simulation tools, a significant discrepancy exists between designed and actual performance. This so-called performance gap occurs as a result of many factors, including the discrepancies between theoretical properties of building materials and properties of the same materials in use, reflected in the physics properties of the entire building. There are several different ways in which building physics properties and the underlying properties of materials can be established: a co-heating test, which measures the overall heat loss coefficient of the building; a dynamic heating test, which, in addition to the overall heat loss coefficient, also measures the effective thermal capacitance and the time constant of the building; and a simulation of the dynamic heating test with a calibrated simulation model, which establishes the same three properties in a non-disruptive way in comparison with the actual physical tests. This lecture introduces a method of measuring building physics properties through actual and simulated dynamic heating tests. It gives insights into the properties of building materials in use, and it documents significant discrepancies between theoretical and measured properties. It introduces a quality assurance method for building construction and retrofit projects, and it explains the application of results on energy efficiency improvements in building design and control. It calls for re-examination of material properties data and for increased safety margins in order to make significant improvements in building energy efficiency.
Recommended audience: ASHRAE members, students, architects, property developers, etc.
What Happens When We Sneeze? (Basic/Intermediate)
Recommended audience: ASHRAE members, students, architects, property developers, building stakeholders, policy makers.
Designing Zero Carbon Buildings - Embodied and Operational Emissions in Achieving True Zero (Basic/Intermediate)
The lecture introduces a structured approach to designing zero carbon buildings, taking into account embodied and operational emissions. The way we design zero carbon buildings starts with making design decisions about the site, geometry, thermal insulation, solar gain, solar shading, thermal mass, ventilation and integration of daylight with electrical lighting. By integrating all these aspects and by balancing the need for heating and cooling, we achieve thermal comfort for building occupants. We then put all of this into number-crunching simulation and optimisation tools, which enable us to harmonise design parameters and squeeze every ‘gram’ of performance. As a result, we obtain renewable energy requirements that balance carbon emissions arising from the combination of design parameters and requirements for heating and cooling. Thus, zero emissions are achieved, and the problem is solved. What more could be there to talk about? Except there is an elephant in the room. If we don’t take embodied emissions into account, we can overshoot the time when zero emissions are expected to be achieved by three to four decades. For that reason, embodied and operational emissions are combined into a Zero Equation to assess the requirements for achieving zero cumulative emissions by a specified year. A working example of a building is introduced, where construction materials, HVAC equipment and renewable energy systems are analysed in detail for embodied emissions. The effects of carbon storage in biomaterials and uncertainties of available data are discussed. The lecture introduces a workflow that enables designers to achieve zero carbon buildings with certainty and by a specified year.
Recommended audience:
ASHRAE members, students, architects, property developers, building stakeholders, policy makers, etc.
The Zero Equation - Determining building emissions status in future years (Basic/Intermediate)
Recommended audience: ASHRAE members, students, architects, property developers, building stakeholders, policy makers, etc.