Robert Platts Email & Phone Number

Robert Platts, B.Sc. Civil Eng. (UNB), SM (MIT); P. Eng.Housing engineering R&D was Bob's chosen road, the journey beginning with his UNB thesis and catapulted by his MIT studies and thesis. The road led through much of North America from the high Arctic to the deep south, as well as Northern and Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and Japan. From 1957-1968 he helped build and conduct the housing R&D program at National Research Council Canada, and then pushed ahead in the work as founder/president of Scanada Consultants Limited, 1968-1997 - considered the pioneer engineering firm in this field. His research encompassed housing production systems, low-rise and high, including new materials and components; housing structure including stressed skin/structural sandwich and high-polymer composite design; housing performance; and retrofit-upgrading of the existing stock. "Performance" R&D addressed structure, energy conservation, and control of heat, air and moisture flows in the building envelope. Arctic work helped prove that air exfiltration, not diffusion, is critical to depositing excessive condensation in the building envelope. Building codes and practices changed accordingly - from this and other R&D. His inventions included lab and field bond testing devices for composites; heat and moisture flow meters and trackers, in situ (but lab quality); open rainscreen joint profiles; waste-fibre-composite building blocks; thermal analytical modeling of the housing stock; moisture-avoidance modeling programs. Cayman Islands work (following on Arctic and Jamaican work decades ago) has sparked his inventions of "non-surgical" hurricane resistance technologies for retrofitting houses and similar buildings. With his KPC partners, inventions are now focused on aids for the disabled, eight already devised and tested and two more in process.

Listed skills include Engineering, R&D, Housing Development, Affordable Housing, and 10 others.