Pranaynil Saikia was born in Assam, India. He received his early education in the city Guwahati, Assam. He pursued his Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering at the VIT University, India (2010-2014) and the Master of Technology in Construction Technology and Management at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India (2014-2016). Pranaynil obtained his PhD degree from the Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India (2021). The key area of his doctoral research was on the improvement of building energy performance through thermal retrofitting strategies. 

Pranaynil’s research interests cover energy systems design and optimisation, with special emphasis on thermal energy storage, phase change materials (PCMs), building energetics and space conditioning. He endeavours towards establishing a versatile connection between modern big data-based machine learning models and traditional thermofluidic analysis of energy systems. Specific milestones include: a genetic algorithm (GA)-based optimal configuration of building envelopes embedded with multiple thermal retrofits, an artificial neural network (ANN) powered non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-2 (NSGA-2) to balance the energy and exergy performances of a sustainable air-conditioning systems, and an ANN based predictive model for evaluating the thermal performance of PCM embedded building envelopes.

Pranaynil is experienced in computational fluid dynamics-based analysis of heat transfer and fluid flow pertaining to the built environment. He has worked on designing healthcare wards wherein the health-safety and thermal comfort of occupants could be maintained with minimal costs of construction and HVAC power supply. In parallel, his experimental work on energy system design has introduced a new class of thermal retrofit (liquid-vapour PCM) for passive building cooling applications.

His research has been disseminated through several international journal and conference papers and book chapters.

Research Assistant

School of Engineering

Cardiff University