Développement d’un indicateur d’efficacité énergétique dans les parois de bâtiments

Internship in Building Energy Efficiency

– Energy Efficiency – Coupled Heat-Mass Transfers – Latent Effects – Porous Wall – Dynamic Simulation – Sustainable Building

Context:
The internship is part of the ANR WALL-E project which aims to redefine the design and evaluation of high-performance energy buildings. Current indicators, such as thermal transmittance U or thermal load, are based only on the first principle of thermodynamics. These indicators also ignore humidity effects, mass transfers, and transient phenomena, which are far from the real functioning of a wall exchanging heat and water vapor with its environment, and which directly influence the energy consumption and the hygrothermal comfort of occupants.

Preliminary work [1] has shown that measuring entropic irreversibilities in a wall could be an excellent performance indicator. However, the transfer of water vapor was only taken into account as a term strongly coupled with heat.

Objectives of the Internship:
The internship aims to develop a rigorous indicator capable of dissociating the two modes of transfers and to provide a local and global measure of the energy efficiency of a wall. For this, the intern will develop entropy balances for coupled heat-mass transfers in a porous wall and introduce the chemical component related to water vapor in order to treat separately the sensible and latent effects and mixing with the environment.

The implementation of these calculations will be done in the numerical simulation tool available in the laboratories.

Required Skills:

Student engineer in 3A or Master 2 in the field of process engineering, energetics, building physics. Knowledge in thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer, and numerical modeling. Practice of a scientific calculation language. Skills with the Matlab software would be a plus. Rigor, scientific curiosity, and a taste for research work will be appreciated.

Possibility of Thesis Continuation:
The WALL-E project will offer the possibility to continue this theme in a thesis, the necessary funding having already been obtained from the National Research Agency (ANR).

Practical Internship Conditions:
The student will work under the supervision of Pr. Jean-Henry FERRASSE and Pr. Benjamin KADOCH. The internship will take place at the M2P2 laboratory of Aix-Marseille University.

Start Date, Duration, and Salary:
The intern can start from February 2026 for a duration of 5 to 6 months. The remuneration will be approximately 600€/month.

Application Modalities:
Interested candidates are invited to submit their application including a CV and a letter of motivation highlighting their experience and skills for this position, to the contacts below.

Contacts:
Pr. Jean-Henry FERRASSE (M2P2, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University) / (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below)., +33 (0) Pr. Benjamin KADOCH (IUSTI, CNRS and Aix-Marseille University) / ,  82

[1]Berger, J. and Ferrasse, J.H. and Gasparin, S. and Le Metayer, O. and Kadoch,

B., Thermodynamic analysis of the effect of mass transfer on a real building wall efficiency under climatic transient conditions, International Journal of Thermal Sciences 2024.