Planning Grant: ERC for Control of Urban Thermal Environments (CUTE)

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The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research. This planning grant will develop well-formulated plans for a future Engineering Research Center that result in quantifiable improvements in health and well-being in cities through the systematic development and deployment of heat-mitigation strategies that address key technological, social, political, and economic challenges. The team proposes a comprehensive multi- disciplinary approach for understanding and addressing the emerging convergent challenges to the urban thermal environment. Continuing growth is resulting in more and larger sources of anthropogenic waste heat, which is released in the urban environment. The understanding and pro-active mitigation of these effects to allow continued growth requires the involvement of physical and social scientists, engineers, public policy experts, city and regional planners, and climatologists. Implementation of any new approaches requires engagement with industry, city administration, and the public at large. Current efforts have focused on controlling the solar absorptivity of building exteriors and pavements, and the planting of vegetation. Model predictive control, and real time mitigation of anthropogenic heat release have not been attempted in a systematic manner, and will be the focus of the proposed multi-pronged effort to manage heat stress and enhance the livability of urban areas. The team to undertake this convergent research collaboration will be assembled during the planning grant using team science approaches, and will involve universities with complementary expertise, national laboratories, industry, city governments, and other stakeholders. During the planning grant, a roadmap for the proposed activities will also be developed, including experimental demonstrations of the proposed concepts in test beds at scale in representative urban environments.The planning activities will help develop four interconnected thrusts. Multi-scale transient modeling of the urban thermal environment, including the effects of anthropogenic heat sources will be achieved by coupling regional meteorological models with experimentally validated finer resolution microscale urban area to achieve real-time coupled, or feed-forward models. This requires addressing the multiple challenges associated with performing this coupling, e.g., inconsistencies in model physics, model inputs, and parameterizations across scales. The ability of these models for near real time heat exposure predictions will be explored. The impact of various strategies for management of anthropogenic heat, including thermal storage, and air flow management will be explored. In addition to controlling anthropogenic sources of waste heat, adaptive thermal properties for buildings, pavements, and green spaces represent an innovative new mechanism for managing the urban thermal environment. The annual mean air temperature of a city of 1 million can be 1-3 degrees Centigrade warmer than its surroundings, with the evening differences as high as 12 degrees Centigrade. With extreme heat accounting for more weather-related deaths each year than any other form of extreme weather, urban populations are disproportionately impacted by rising temperatures. Urban heat islands further result in increased summertime energy usage, higher air-conditioning costs, increased air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as degradation of water quality. A key contributor to the urban air temperature rise is anthropogenic heat release from building heating ventilation and air-conditioning systems, transportation systems, and industrial processes' activities that could be managed to lessen heat exposure with real-time information on temperatures across cities. Without active mitigation strategies, continued growth of urban areas poses increasing health and quality of life challenges for urban populations, as well as sharply growing energy demand. The proposed ERC will focus on developing a systematic framework to characterize and control the urban thermal environments, to enhance emergency response operations during heat wave events, to contribute to the health and quality of life of the inhabitants, and to reduce primary energy consumption.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.