Professional Researcher
Paul Raftery has been a key contributor to CBE’s research since joining us in 2013. His overarching purpose is to improve building energy efficiency by investigating advanced integrated HVAC systems. He has deep hands-on experience in a range of areas: HVAC engineering, building automation systems and controls, energy and emissions modeling, fault detection and diagnosis, full-scale laboratory experiments, measurement and verification, and demonstrations in buildings.
He is currently the Principal Investigator on a CEC funded research project focused on decarbonizing large existing buildings using heat recovery and thermal storage (approx. $6M). In past years he has been a Principal Investigator on multiple Department of Energy and California Energy Commission (CEC) funded research projects focused on reducing natural gas use in existing large buildings (approx. $2M ), integrated smart ceiling fans and thermostats (approx. $2M), radiant hydronic systems (approx. $3M in funding), and using building metadata schema (BRICK) to develop and demonstrate portable building analytics and controls applications (approx. $1M), among other topics. He is an active member of IBPSA and ASHRAE, including as a voting member ASHRAE GPC 36 (high performance control sequences) and a past chair of ASHRAE TC 6.5 (radiant heating and cooling).
He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the Munster Technological University and a PhD from the University of Galway, Ireland. In between degrees, he worked as a facilities engineer for a biomedical device manufacturer, improving the performance of clean room conditioning and precision gas mixing systems. He obtained a Fulbright in 2008 which funded a research position at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. While there he developed a new method for calibrating building energy models to detailed hourly measured data, which he piloted at the Intel manufacturing campus in Dublin, Ireland, and later used in his PhD dissertation. Afterwards, as a senior research engineer at the IRUSE group, he and his team developed an automated fault detection and diagnosis tool for large industrial air handling units, earning the ICT Invention of the Year award. Since returning to the US, he has been awarded the ASHRAE Technology Award at the Golden Gate Chapter and Region X level, the ASHRAE Distinguished Service Award, an ASHRAE Best Paper Award and a Journal of Building and Environment Best Paper Award.