Civil Engineering Seminar Series (CESS)

The HOBEL laboratory at EPFL is organizing the upcoming CESS and will welcome Dr. Miguel Martin on September 13, 2024 (from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM in the Douglas/Castanea conference room of building B as well as online) to discuss the SCIENCES project (Smart City Innovations and Experiments using New Climate and Energy Simulations). The seminar will be followed by a reception.

Who is Miguel Martin ?

Dr. Miguel Martin is currently a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow conducting his research at the Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) and Carnegie Mellon University (USA) under the sponsorship of the European Commission. Before being granted the Marie Curie Global Fellowship, he was research engineer at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi (UAE). At that time, he worked on physically-based modelling approaches to simulate interactions between a building and its outdoor environment. To improve simulations of anthropogenic heat releases and countermeasures to urban heat islands using physically-based models, he studied methods to assess the outdoor conditions using computational fluid dynamics during his Ph.D. at the National University of Singapore. After his Ph.D., he joined the Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore as a senior research fellow to analyse urban heat fluxes from thermal images collected from a rooftop observatory. He now tries to use all his accumulated experience in urban building energy modelling and outdoor field experiments to see how artificial intelligence could help in improving the temporal resolution and time horizon with which interactions between buildings and their outdoor environment can be simulated and studied at the neighbourhood scale through a city digital twin.

What will be discussed during the talk ?

Climate change is considered as a major threat to any organism on Earth for the years to come. This hazard could considerably be mitigated if energy consumed by buildings was drastically reduced using either active or passive strategies. From this observation, the European Commission has made one of its top missions to support all cities in becoming climate neutral and smart by 2050.

As a contribution to this mission, the SCIENCES project aims at exploring modern approaches using both physics and artificial intelligence to simulate interactions between buildings and their outdoor conditions at the neighbourhood scale through a city digital. This objective intends to be achieved by first studying methods to automatically generate detailed building energy models from a 3D city model. Detailed building energy models are then used to test different simulation techniques either by coupling them with a data driven urban canopy model or by using them to train a full artificial intelligence based model. At the end, it is expected to use partial or full artificial intelligence based models to predict impacts of buildings on urban heat islands and climate change over the horizon between 20 and 30 years from now. The predictions are expected to be used as guidance for architects and urban planners to better support European cities in their green and digital transition.