Professional Researcher
Paul Raftery, PhD, 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, energy modeling, building automation systems and controls, fault detection and diagnosis, full-scale laboratory experiments, measurement and verification, machine learning, and software development.
He is currently a Co-Principal Investigator on two California Energy Commission research projects: one focused on radiant hydronic systems (approx. $3M in funding) and one focused on integrated smart ceiling fans and thermostats (approx. $2M). He is an active member of IBPSA and ASHRAE, including as a voting member of ASHRAE TC 6.5 (radiant heating and cooling) and ASHRAE GPC 36 (high performance control sequences).
He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the Cork Institute of Technology and a PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway. 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.