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Beating the Heat 2023

We are happy to announce that the "Beating the Heat 2023" Conference on urban climate and its impacts will be hosted by the Chair of Building Physics at ETH Zurich. The meeting will take place at Friday September 15th 2023.

bth2023.ethz.ch

Article Featured by the International Association for Urban Climate

Our recent paper co-authored with the research group of Dr. Fan Yifan on heat dome is featured in the latest Quarterly Newsletter of the external page International Association for Urban Climate

Heat Dome

An urban heat dome forms during external page heatwaves and expected to become the ‘norm’ in the future due to climate change. Our large-eddy simulations of a 400 km² idealized square city show that the flow of the heat dome is markedly deflected by the Coriolis force. When urban characteristic diameter reaches beyond 10 km, the deflection of the urban heat dome in high-latitude regions has to be considered in order to understand city-scale heat transport at high-spatial resolution and to underpin the development of fine-tuned measures for local urban heat mitigation.

external page Read the full paper here.

Article on Cristina Dominguez Research

The Swiss Magazine "Baublatt" published an article about Cristina's Research on rural energy demand modelling in Kenya and Guatemala.
Read it Download here (PDF, 735 KB) (in German)

A cover for the journal "Buildings"

Recent paper from the Chair of Building Physics has been selected as the cover picture of the current issue of journal "Buildings"

The paper reports results of Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations of wind-driven rain on the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, Canada. The case study presents critical periods and facade locations with high freeze-thaw damage, and evaluates the future damage risk due to climate change, considering milder winters with higher temperatures and higher rainfall amount.

Investigating crime scenes with blood droplet analysis

A new application for our research.

The study of droplets behaviour applied to forensic science. In this article is shown how the contribution of the study on fluids and droplets on fabrics, developed in collaboration with Prof. Carmeliet, can be applied to the forensic investigation field.

ETH medal 2020 for Mingyang Chen

Mingyang Chen has been awarded with the ETH medal 2020 on nomination by the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering for his dissertation ‘Sorption induced deformation of nanoporous materials’.

Mingyang Chen was PhD student and postdoc at the chair of Building Physics from June 2015 until February 2020.

He has now a SNF early Post-Doc Mobility fellowship at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore on the project ‘Multi-scale modeling of hydration and water transport in highly deformable hierarchically structured hydrogels’.

Krank vor Hitze? Wie das Klima unsere Gesundheit verändert

A 45-minutes documentary on the topic of climate change and its impact on our health. How is the Chair of Building Physics working towards this scenario. external page Watch the streaming now!

NSB 2020 Building Physics conference, Tallinn

Professor Jan Carmeliet explains the smart wetting technologies for building materials, to mitigate local heat islands using evaporative cooling. The video has been presented on the 07.09.2020 at NSB 2020 in Tallin, Estonia (online).

Watch the Video

Multiscale Zoom into Moisture Sorption and Fluid Transport: a step towards design of new porous materials.

Keynote Speech at NSB 2020

Hitze in der Stadt on SRF

Two members of the Chair of Building Physics, Aytaç Kubilay and Andreas Rubin, explain the Urban Heat Island effect and present research that is performed at the chair regarding Urban Heat Island mitigation in the upcoming broadcast of SRF-Einstein on “Hitze in der Stadt”.

external page Watch the Video

Energy access for all: fieldwork in rural Africa

Cristina Dominguez, doctoral student at the Chair of Building Physics, writes about her recent experience in Kenya. Her research focuses on developing a data-driven geospatial methodology to forecast the energy demand of rural households in developing countries to support the planning of electrification projects.

“Asphalt has a major downside”

Together with scientists from Empa, ETH Professor Jan Carmeliet studied the latest heatwave last June. ETH News asked him where is the most pleasant place to be in Zurich in summer, and which structural measures should be taken to protect cities from extreme heat events.

21.07.2017

Latest Papers

How to beat the heat in cities through urban climate modelling

Jan Carmeliet is an expert on urban climate and heat wave mitigation. He is professor at the Chair of Building Physics at the Departement of Mechanical and Process Engineering of ETH Zurich. Dominique Derome specializes in building and urban physics aiming for a more resilient built environment. She is professor at the Université de Sherbrooke, Canada, and holds a Canada Research Chair tier I in Multiscale Building Physics. As experts in the field, the two researchers were asked to write an exclusive article for the journal Nature Review Physics to explain what factors make cities turn hot, and what can be done to cool them.

The goal of the publication is to help the physics community contribute to sustainable goals. The comments paper was published on 22 November 2023 and is part of a collection of articles on the subject of physics and sustainability that the journal published this year.

Article: external page https://rdcu.be/drKeY

Machine Learning Reveals Frictional Failure

Research in Collaboration with LANL

Spatial and temporal forecasts of earthquakes are among the biggest open challenges in Earth Sciences. A major difficulty in studying earthquakes is the limited possibility to investigate seismic events at the point of its origin, deep in the Earth. Real earthquakes can only be analyzed by seismometers far away from the exact point where the rupture takes place. To get better insights in the genesis of earthquakes, scientists mainly rely on two approaches i.e. building a scaled model in laboratory conditions to replicate the behavior of shearing and colliding tectonic plates or building a computational model for simulating the behavior of fault damage zone under shear.

A tree relies on the strength of its building material to stand up. Being moisture sensitive, how can it cope with the continuous variations in relative humidity? How can wood, used in buildings, furniture or supporting paintings, do the same? This is due to hysteresis, a passive mechanism embedded in its polymeric nanostructure that allows wood to hold its moisture under varying relative humidity. This mechanism also allows important wooden artefacts, like the painting of the Mona Lisa, from cracking. Hysteresis has been observed since long, now it is understood.

Additional Information

Laboratory of Multiscale Studies in Building Physics; Our mission is excellence in research and technology development related to the following topics: Urban microclimate, Fluids and porous materials, Granular media, Hygrothermal performance durability

Contact

Prof. Dr. Jan Carmeliet

Full Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering

Professur für Bauphysik
Tannenstrasse 3
8092 Zürich
Switzerland