Research
Research Interests and Focus Areas
URBAN HEAT EXPOSURE
Urban overheating, driven by global climate change, extreme heat events and enhanced by urban development, is a major contemporary environmental challenge with significant impacts on the sustainability and livability of our future cities. Urban overheating represents a multi-faceted challenge that impacts well-being, performance, and health of individuals, while being influenced by a complex interaction between the building, city, and global scale climates.
Explore in a storymap
BUILDING-TO-CANOPY URBAN ENERGY
The challenges of urban heat and the rapid rate of urbanization further contributes to the growth in urban energy demand. The use of materials and urban design characteristics significantly contributes to urban energy consumption as well as the contribution it would have to urban climate, which should be closely examined and assessed.
URBAN VENTILATION AND AIRFLOW
Efficient natural ventilation is dependent on the microclimate conditions of an urban environment, and significantly affected by urban design. Computational fluid dynamics of urban flow at the microscale help us understand and address urban ventilation in cities which further contributes to improving urban heat and air quality challenges.
BUILT ENVIRONMENT AIR QUALITY
Despite dramatic progress in this field, air quality in many countries continues to harm people’s health and the environment. Indoor pollution can be even more deadly since we spend 80% of our time each day in indoor spaces.
Methodologies
Urban climate modeling (micro- and meso-scale)
Environmental sensing
IoT and wearable technologies
Research Projects
Outdoor thermal comfort – from steady neutrality to dynamic pleasure
Thermal comfort research has been centred around uni-dimensional thermal neutrality in steady environments for almost a century. This study aims to re-orient the outdoor thermal comfort research discourse towards non-steady-state alternatives that afford greater opportunities for multi-dimensional thermal pleasure compared to steady, uni-dimensional neutrality.
Large Eddy Simulation (LES) has been used with sub-meter resolution on both idealized arrays of urban canyons and realistic city configurations to obtain detailed 3D data for exchanges of momentum, pollutant, moisture, and heat. This project aims to study pedestrian thermal comfort, pollutant dispersion, urban heat island mitigation, and urban canopy parameterization (UCP).
Maintaining indoor environmental quality (IEQ) is a key priority in educational buildings. However, most studies rely on outdoor measurements and environmental conditions which makes it hard to establish causality and resilience limits. To address this, a fine-grained, low-cost, multi-parameter IoT sensor network was deployed to fully depict the spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of environmental quality in our educational building in Sydney. The building was particularly selected as it represents a multi-use university facility that relies on passive ventilation strategies, and therefore suitable for establishing a living lab for integrating innovative IoT sensing technologies.
Thermal Retrofitting of High-Rise Social Housing
About one-fourth of Australian homes lack HVAC systems, making them vulnerable to extreme weather events. The issue becomes even more severe in social housing, where energy poverty is common. This research aims to evaluate the impact of thermal retrofitting on reducing heat gain in high-rise social housing in Sydney. Microclimate modeling is integrated into the energy modeling process to ensure the use of more accurate weather data. The retrofitting strategies are also assessed under both current and future climate scenarios to provide a better understanding of optimized solutions for different weather conditions.
