Submitted Abstract
Buildings consume large amounts of energy from the electrical grid that often originates from coal and fossil fuel power plants, increasing greenhouse gas footprint. Moreover, today’s buildings use more energy then they produce. On the other hand, buildings are still viewed as shelters, a combination of bricks, steel and concrete. If we could shift this archetype toward a building as a fully independent entity, society would experience tremendous benefits. The realisation of this vision seems to be an urgent matter, for two reasons: acceleration of population growth and urbanisation of the world. Namely, the current world population is expected to increase by 29% by 2050, while at the same time, the projected urban population will increase by 11% according to a recent United Nations report.DATA4WIND project presents a solution in achieving this vision faster by relying on urban wind power utilisation. The goal of the DATA4WIND project is to develop a hybrid approach based on data assimilated technology and strategy enabling synergy between computational and experimental wind engineering. This will be accomplished by fulfilling the next research objectives: designing general data assimilation toolbox (that can be used in other wind engineering fields) and creating a data assimilation strategy for urban wind power utilisation. In this way, reliable prediction of aerodynamic information on local wind flow patterns essential for urban wind power utilisation is assured. Besides, DATA4WIND project will develop a computationally less demanding methodology allowing multi-directionality of the incoming wind flow using reduced order modelling techniques. As a final outcome, DATA4WIND will consider wind power utilisation over existing buildings of Belval area placed in Luxembourg. Besides contributions to scientific knowledge of urban wind energy harvesting, project plans on exploring the benefits of such an approach in the field of urban wind comfort. Thus, the output of DATA4WIND approach will have a wide implication on the urban built environment.