BRANZ materials scientist Anna Walsh has won the Royal Society Te Apārangi 180 Seconds of Fascination video competition in the professional category with her research on Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) in Aotearoa. The competition asks early career researchers to take less than three minutes to explain their work to a general audience.

In the video, Walsh explains that “structural insulated panels offer a potential solution to New Zealand’s housing crisis by providing energy-efficient and highly prefabricated buildings and research at BRANZ is aimed at finding out more about them.” She says that though SIPs are commonly used elsewhere in the world, not enough is known about how they perform in a New Zealand context. As a result, gaining resource consent for a building with SIPs can present challenges.

“We wanted this video to demonstrate why our work is important not just to the construction industry but to the public too,” Walsh says. “Housing is a subject that impacts almost every New Zealander. We want to show how we test new construction systems so we can be confident they perform well in the long term under our harsh climate and during an earthquake or fire.”