"Investigation of Complex Shear and Vortex Flows With Application to Wind Engineering, Energy and Environment"

城市人口占世界人口的50%，却消耗了65%以上的能源，产生了60%以上的温室气体排放。在气候变化和新的人口结构背景下，可持续城市化是当前和未来的全球挑战之一，需要通过创新的解决方案来应对。未来的城市社区需要(i)由新形式的能源（风能、太阳能等）维持，（ii）抵御自然灾害（飓风、龙卷风等）的能力。

While encompassing 50% of the world population, cities consume more than 65% of its energy and produce more than 60% of its greenhouse-gas emissions. In the context of climate change and new demographics, Sustainable Urbanization is one of the present and future global challenges that need to be addressed by innovative solutions. The Future Urban Community needs to be (i) sustained by new forms of energy (wind, solar, etc.) and (ii) resilient to natural disasters (hurricanes, tornados, etc.). Wind is one of the important factors that can generate intensive damage while at the same time be used in producing energy. The tornado events in both US and Canada this year demonstrate the damaging effects of these winds to life, property and infrastructure. Nevertheless, these thunderstorm wind systems are not yet part of the design codes even if their impact to interior North America rises to more than 65% of the total wind damage. Research needs to be carried out to: (i) properly simulate these events and (ii) to understand the way they impact the natural and built environment. CanWEA projects that by 2025 20% of the total Canadian energy can be provided by wind. While wind turbine technology is maturing the efficiency of wind turbines and wind farms needs to increase. Blades are becoming longer and new aerodynamic shapes are adopted for robustness but with some penalties in terms of vibrations and noise. When sitting a wind farm in complex topographic terrain or when placing the wind turbines in wind farm arrays, flow uncertainties can drastically reduce the power outputs. The proposed research addresses the damaging effects of wind on buildings and structures and the aerodynamic optimization of wind turbines and wind farms. The research will make use of the novel Wind Engineering Energy and Environment Dome recently funded at the University of Western Ontario to revolutionize the way wind systems are simulated in a laboratory. It will then investigate how these wind systems impact on buildings and structures and how to improve the design of wind turbines and wind farms.