Artificial intelligence can help get the most out of urban wind energy, say Concordia researchers

Building on a project she began as an undergraduate, Higgins started the data-gathering process at Concordia's Building Aerodynamics/Wind Tunnel Lab. It can simulate wind gusts on large buildings with a 1 to 100 or smaller-scale model of a block of downtown Montreal, as well as on individual buildings of different shapes -- square, rectangular, U-shaped, T-shaped or L-shaped, and in different configurations. The lab also has a scale model of a section of the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Bridge-Tunnel in east-end Montreal. "This preliminary work involved a lot of wind tunnel experiments with various building configurations," explains Stathopoulos, a professor in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science. "Stéphanie ran tests for each of them, with wind coming from different directions, as it would in real life, and tried to predict what the amplification of the wind would be at each location. This particular experimentation was interesting because we are trying to see where we can get the highest wind speed. This is the opposite of what we usually do, which is to try to reduce exposure to wind to protect buildings from natural disasters."