Testimonial by Jerome

At Saint-Gobain Recherche since December 2004, Jerome has now led the Products and Systems Thermics group for 3 years. *






The group's mission is to support, in its wider meaning, the Saint-Gobain Group's Habitat strategy. "We develop tools to study the thermal behaviour and energy performance of buildings. More generally, we try to understand thermal operation in buildings, in order to optimise the products and systems developed by the Group," says Jérôme.

This involves issues that lead Jérôme's group to work with Saint-Gobain Recherche's other departments and groups  as well as with other research centres of the Saint-Gobain Group.

"Internally, we interact a lot with groups whose expertise is different from ours, such as mathematicians, opticians, chemists or Virtual Reality specialists. We also work extensively with the CRIR (Ed.: Saint-Gobain's Isover Research Centre at Rantigny) and the CRDC (Ed.: Chantereine R & D Centre) to develop core expertise jointly. And now we are beginning to work more and more with two of the other research centres, the NRDC (Northboro Research & Development Center, Ed.) and CREE (Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes Européen -Centre for European Research and Studies, Ed.)," he explains.

This expertise is still in its early days, and the group is currently feeling its way. Sometimes for subjects that are still a little exploratory, it is not always easy to convince the internal customer of the interest of continuing to work on the project. "This forces us into developing additional expertise, for example, a material originally designed to reduce energy consumption ultimately becomes an attractive solution for thermal comfort. There is a positive side to being pushed to one's limits!"
 

* Since October 2011, Jerome has evolved Northboro Research Center (USA). He is responsible for the team Thermal and Building Modeling.