FRS guest lecture: Urban climate resilience

FRS invites you for a guest lecture by Prof. Dr. Jan Carmeliet, full professor at the Chair of Building Physics at ETH Zürich and PI for the Climate Resilience in High-Density Cities module at FRS, on Tue, 29 Nov.

Talk 1: Computational fluid dynamics for the assessment of urban climate, wind comfort and wind driven rain in the built environment
(30 mins + 15 mins Q&A)
We first give an overview of recent advances in modeling turbulent wind flow at pedestrian-level in the built environment. Then we present a multiscale urban microclimate model including vegetation, and apply the model to design and assess different heatwave mitigation measures. Since cities are being densified, we study the wind comfort around high-rise buildings and the beneficial effect of trees. Finally, we discuss the modelling of wind driven rain (WDR) on complex building groups and suggest new methods to assess WDR in a changing climate.

Talk 2: Changing urban climate and impact on building physics
(30 mins + 15 mins Q&A)
Over the last decades, the impact of climate change on the urban climate and building performance of buildings has been of increasing interest. In this keynote lecture, different approaches ranging from full physical modeling to engineering methods will be presented to take into account the urban climate. We analyze the urban climate at city scale and focus on the synergetic impact of urban heat islands and heatwaves on building cooling energy demand. We focus on the design of mitigation scenarios for urban overheating during heatwaves, first analyzing large scale scenarios on city scale, followed by local mitigation scenarios using vegetation, water spraying and enhanced night ventilation for neighborhoods undergoing densification.

Speaker's profile

Jan Carmeliet is an architectural engineer holding a PhD in Civil Engineering / Building Physics in 1992 from KU Leuven in Belgium. He was assistant, associate and full Professor Building Physics at KU Leuven from 1998 until 2008 and part-time Professor at TU Eindhoven from 2001 until 2008.

Since June 2008, Jan Carmeliet is full professor at the Chair of Building Physics at the department of Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. He was head of Laboratory of Multi-scale Studies in Building Physics at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland from 2008 to 2017.

His research interests concern urban climate and urban heat island mitigation, multiscale behaviour of porous materials and their fluid interactions, and building energy demand at building and urban scale.
His research resulted in more than 350 scientific journal papers. His h-index is 81 on Google Scholar. He has graduated more than 40 PhD students.

He was research councillor of the National Science Foundation Switzerland from 2017 to 2020 and expert of the Swiss Innovation Agency (InnoSuisse) from 2013 to 2020. He was director of the graduate program ‘master integrated building systems’ at ETHZ from 2014 to 2018. He was member of the research commission of ETH Zürich from 2012 to 2016, the scientific commission of the CCEM (Centre of Competence Energy and Mobility) from 2012 to 2016 and the Board of Energy Science Centre ETH Zürich from 2010 to 2017.