Yue Yu is a doctoral researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, The University of Manchester, working under the supervision of Dr Alejandro Gallego-Schmid and Dr Obuks Ejohwomu. Her PhD investigates how circular economy principles can be applied to space cooling in buildings, with a particular focus on integrating passive and active cooling technologies and exploring innovative business models such as Cooling as a Service (CaaS). Using the Manchester Engineering Campus Development (MECD) as a case study, she combines systematic literature review, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) to assess the environmental and economic performance of circular cooling strategies across the building life cycle.
Yue’s work builds on supervisory expertise in circular economy, LCA, LCC, social sustainability assessment and multi-criteria decision analysis, and aims to develop decision-support insights for policy makers, practitioners and building owners. Before starting her PhD, she completed an MA in Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London and a BSc in Human Geography and Urban Planning in China, and has published on passive cooling, carbon trading and sustainable energy strategies.
Research interests
- Passive–active cooling integration and building energy systems
- Circular economy and circular cooling in buildings
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC)
- Cooling systems, refrigerants and building envelopes
- Social and economic dimensions of low-carbon and circular transitions
Areas of expertise
- Circular economy in the built environment
- Environmental and economic sustainability assessment
- Multi-level analysis of cooling strategies
