Research summary
Dr Scott Allan Orr was appointed as Lecturer in Heritage Data Science in the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage (within the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy, and Resources) in 2019. His research uses data-driven multi-scale approaches to further understanding and management of the historic built environment.
His research focuses on experimental methodologies that enable understanding of weather events and climate and their impacts on the historic built environment. This includes façade-scale investigation techniques that adapt non-destructive equipment designed for contemporary civil engineering applications to identify moisture regimes in solid-wall masonry structures. More recently, he has also collaborated on characterising damage to materials by post-processing hygrothermal simulations. On a regional and national scale, Scott uses probabilistic modelling with semi-empirical evaluations of wind-driven rain to characterise changes in exposure of the UK’s built environment due to climate change in the 21st century; this work predicted future exposure to be more polarised in winter and summer months and include shorter but more intense and concentrated wind-driven rain events. This work also identified statistical flaws and limitations of existing standards (e.g. ISO 15927-3) and led to new metrics (indices of exposure) with improved statistical robustness, including some to specifically characterise extreme events in the context of building performance. Scott is also currently an advisor on a doctoral project in Belgium to characterise salt weathering risk to historic buildings, including national-scale evaluations of risk represented by a range of historic building typologies and databases of salt ion concentrations.