"let the wind flow" workshop

Energy and Wind Research for Future Cities and Societies

Workshop at the occasion of the opening of the ETHZ/EMPA wind tunnel

11 March 2011, 13h30 - 17h, EMPA Akademie Dübendorf, Switzerland

DownloadInvitation - Program (PDF, 293 KB)vertical_align_bottom

Invited speakers are:
Prof. Gian-Luca Bona (Director EMPA)
Prof. Marc Angélil (ETHZ, Dean Department of Architecture)
Prof. Kostas Boulouchos (ETHZ, Director Energy Science Center)
Prof. Fernando Porté-Agel (EPFL)
Prof. Jeroen Vanbeeck (Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Belgium)
Prof. Bert Blocken (TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
Prof. Jan Carmeliet (ETHZ/EMPA)

There is a strong global trend towards urbanization. Urban heat island effects accentuated by global warming and pollutant dispersion may have detrimental impacts on the urban climate, human comfort and health, but also on the energy use of our buildings and cities. A major question, driving urban planners, economists, policy makers, and in particular researchers, goes to the heart of what makes a city sustainable, pollution free and healthy.

This necessitates innovative concepts of urban mobility to face increased traffic and pollution, and the development of an integrated set of urban modelling tools for the planning and management of energy and mass flows in smart cities throughout all scales of the city. In the fundamental understanding of urban physics we are still faced with a gap between climatologists predicting future weather patterns and building engineers striving to make buildings and cities more energy‐efficient.

In this workshop, we address a rich pallet of wind related subjects, ranging from wind comfort, wind energy, pollutant dispersion, snow transport, wind driven rain to energy supply and mobility. Several building and environmental design examples will be given, such as the Antarctic station, the European parliament, the Amsterdam ArenA football stadium, gas dispersion in downtown Montreal and ship navigation in the sea canal Ria de Ferrol.