LIFD Colloquium: Henry Burridge

Talk Title:

The fluid mechanics of buildings

Abstract

We often think of our buildings as being static structures, yet every day each of us requires about one million litres of air to flow into around our buildings. Maintaining good indoor air quality is vital for our health, well-being, and productivity but conditioning that air for our comfort can cost the Earth. Improving our understanding of the fluid mechanics, and delivering successful solutions, is a grand challenge for society in realising the comfortable resilient sustainable buildings that we demand, and that our planet very much needs. In this talk, traditional approaches to modelling building air flows will be discussed in the context of some of our recent efforts along this approach. Gaps between these efforts and suitable progress in resolving our grand challenge will be highlighted and alternative approaches; namely, assimilating measured data and probabilistic descriptions of indoor activities to estimate air flows in operational buildings, will be presented. Ultimately, opportunities for us all to contribute to this challenge will be discussed.

You can live stream this event via the LIFD Seminar Series- https://cassyni.com/events/YaV6cAC5EE1HLwqj8yZJx5?zxbq0r