Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Human actions in response to climate change require both GHG emission mitigation and adaptation to increasingly common extreme weather events. Adaptation to climate change is an under studied topic in sustainable building and community design requiring new methodologies and technologies to provide essential services to occupants in a time of need. The trend towards fully electrified buildings may make buildings more susceptible to grid--outages as redundant and diversified fuel supplies (eg. fossil fuels and electric utilities) are reduced to a single point of failure. Although the transition away from fossil fuels is necessary, more rigorous thinking is required to improve the resilience of fully electrified infrastructure. At the moment, we lack both the tools and processes to quantify key metrics such as thermal resiliency in tandem with annual performance indicators. The goal of this research program is to develop adaptive engineering approaches to improve building resilience. Computational approaches are validated using experiments resulting in an improvement of performance indicators by up to ten times. Three sub-themes of this proposed research program include: (1) climate change adaptation, (2) peak emission response, and (3) energy security. The climate change adaptation sub--theme improves the resilience building and communities to increasingly frequent and severe climate change weather events. Energy security enables the self--powering of mission--critical infrastructure during cyber physical attacks or outages, and the sub--theme around emission response programs explore a voluntary disconnection from the utility grid, or emission response maneuver, to avoid peak emissions. The emphasis on all three sub--themes improves the utilization of adaptive technologies accelerating economic payback compared to the sole focus on climate change adaptation. The outcomes of this research are design approaches for buildings and communities that simultaneously improve resilience while designing for net--zero emissions. Improving on the state--of--the--art, this research program creates novel computational workflows to quantify resilience while scaling studies from buildings to communities and urban environments. This scientific contributions of this research program benefit Canadians by identifying affordable pathways towards buildings and communities that provide essential services during grid--outages. The novel outcomes of this research include open--source software and experimentally validated methodologies that industry and other researchers can use to address mitigation and adaptation of the built-environment.