Connect with our Research Connections: Simulating the Urban Canopy’s Impact on Natural Cooling

Our Research Connections series highlights design and make work in the industries Autodesk serves. In this installment, Catherine Gorle, faculty member in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, and Nicholas Bachand, PhD candidate at Stanford, discuss how energy demand for building cooling plays a dual role as both a contributor to and a byproduct of rising global temperatures.

While building cooling is essential for comfort, it poses both a sustainability and resiliency challenge. One alternative to conventional active cooling is natural cooling, where wind and/or buoyant forces drive air through a building when the temperature outdoors is cooler than indoors. The indoor environment, coupled with building materials, then functions as a thermal battery that sustains lower indoor temperatures as external temperatures rise. This latent cooling effect can either augment or replace active cooling.

This talk presents the latest research to numerically quantify the surrounding urban canopy’s effect on interior airflow with several building interiors.

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