Sustainable Built Environment

We operate a suite of indoor and outdoor testbed facilities dedicated to the research, development, and validation of sustainable building technologies under both controlled and real-world tropical conditions.

Our indoor testbeds provide a controlled environment for evaluating building technologies before field deployment, allowing precise measurement and comparison of performance under repeatable conditions. Our outdoor testbeds complement this by exposing technologies to Singapore's actual climate — heat, humidity, and solar loads — so that performance data reflects how these systems behave in real operating conditions, not just simulations.

Across both facilities, we deploy and trial a range of alternative cooling technologies, including phase change materials for thermal storage and passive load management, nature-based cooling systems that use vegetation and evaporative effects to lower ambient and surface temperatures, and thermo-electric cooling units as compact alternatives to conventional refrigerant-based systems. These technologies are instrumented and monitored on-site, with AI used to optimise their operation — tuning control strategies, scheduling, and system performance to maximise energy efficiency across the different technologies deployed at the testbeds.

Together, these facilities give us the physical infrastructure to test, compare, and refine emerging building technologies under authentic operating conditions, supporting the translation of promising innovations into deployable solutions for Singapore and the region.