The fluid mechanics of buildings

We often take our buildings to be just the static structures, yet every day each of us requires about one million litres of air to flow into and around our buildings. Maintaining good indoor air quality is vital for our health, well-being, and productivity but conditioning that air for our comfort can cost the Earth. Improving our understanding of the fluid mechanics, and delivering successful solutions, is a grand challenge for society in realising the comfortable resilient sustainable buildings that we demand, and that our planet very much needs. In this talk, the traditional approach to modelling building air flows will be discussed in the context of some of our recent efforts following this tradition. Gaps between these efforts and suitable progress in resolving our grand challenge will be highlighted and alternative approaches will be presented; namely, assimilating measured data and probabilistic descriptions of indoor activities to estimate air flows in operational buildings. Ultimately, opportunities for us all to contribute to this challenge will be discussed.