Seminar by Professor Philipp Geyer
Please register here
Abstract
In view of climate change and resource sparseness, the realization of a sustainable built environment is one of the major challenges for the building domain. As the built environment is largely responsible for environmental impact, it is essential to develop the future built environment so that it is compatible with a long-term livable future regarding its environmental, economic and social aspects. Requirements such as energy-efficiency, resource economy, reduction of emissions, social and economic factors, etc. with their discipline and sector-crossing character cause complexities that never occurred before indesign and planning. The concept of sustainability with its three pillars of environmental, economic and social sustainability is defined for the building domain by certification systems. The indicators of these systems are often contradictory with regard to design and planning and require multidisciplinary decisions integrating design and engineering. Architectural design and urban planning lack appropriate assistance models and tools for discipline-integrating connections between designing and engineering. In particular, performance analyses such as laborious energy simulations and sustainability evaluationsare usually separated from the design process—a fact that impedes performance-driven design for energy-efficiency, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, resource economy, cost-efficiency, etc.
The lecture will show the potential and approaches of computer modeling based on systems engineering and respective modelling to support designers and planners to manage these complexities. A special focus is put on discipline-integrative decision making in the view of sustainability. Computer assistance methods and interactive tools that implement systems engineering will serve towards tackling the required complex discipline integration. By examples it is illustrated how Systems modeling, including rapidly responding performance analysis as part of this computer modeling approach and the development of computer tools, forms an assistance for decision-making fordesigning and planning a sustainable built environment.
Biography
Philipp Geyer is assistant professor at the Department of Architecture within the Faculty of Engineering Science of the KU Leuven. His research field is sustainable building design, construction and technology supported by intelligent computation, modelling, and simulation. He holds a Diploma and a Doctor of Engineering in architecture (PhD) from Technical University of Berlin. In his doctoral research, which he partly conducted as visiting scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he developed amethod for applying Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) to building design. This approach adapted methods from aerospace engineering and developed them further for supporting decision making in performance-oriented building design. As a postdoc fellow at Technische Universität München (TUM) and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) conducted research on performance-oriented and strategic design by systems engineering and developed the method of parametric systems modelling (PSM) for the built environment. He is committee member of the European Group for Intelligent Computing in Engineering (eg-ice) has more than 40 publications in international journals, books and proceedings and coedited three scientific peer-reviewed publications. Furthermore, he is responsible for system design, optimization, and construction in the research enterprise Watergy. This enterprise develops innovative energy and water systems for sustainable buildings and greenhouses, which provide air moistening and dehumidification, heating,cooling and water regeneration.