Projectlist

Part II/ACS projects (2024)

Climate change will result in more, more intense, and longer lasting heatwaves. To quantify the impact of heatwaves on building occupants, we have created a new metric called Activity Hours and the Heatalyzer tool (code released on GitHub). I'm keen to supervise projects that build on this work. Examples include:

• Integrating more archetypes and geographies into Heatalyzer, which currently only supports London weather and UK building archetypes.
• Understanding the weather and building conditions lead to reaching liveability and survivability limits.
• Analysing the sensitivity of results to building orientation and ventilation (which need to be modelled in Energy+)
• Creating a map to show how the effects of a heatwave will be felt in each area of a city. For example, using socioeconomic data (available in the US on a congressional district scale) to map areas that will be affected by heatwaves in terms of their socioeconomic status and developing an interactive website/app to showcase results and aid engagement.
• Modeling mitigation strategies in Energy+ and adding to the dashboard tool so that citizens can evaluate the impact of each strategy. Mark out strategies that do and do not depend on power grid availablity.
• Exploiting local energy storage and energy use flexibility to mitigate the impact of a heatwave on the power grid using local energy.
• Determining and representing uncertainty in our results due to lack of knowledge of building construction, weather, occpuant health status, acclimatisation effects and behaviour changes.
• Personalization of our results to actual building data, matching the building data to the closest archetype and using all sources of information about the building, such as databases of building stock (e.g. US has 500K building database of representative buildings from NREL).

The outcomes I hope we can achieve using this work are

• Identifying the specific parts of a population likely to be most affected by a heatwave and giving them advance warning on effective measures they should take to mitigate its impacts.
• Giving policy makers the data they need to allocate funding to mitigation activities such as better insulation, exterior shading, and solar-powered air conditioning.
• Alerting health care facilities to the expected number of heatstroke cases to expect from a heatwave.