From Discovery Science to Industrial Applications - Digital Twins of Built Environments

Speaker: Professor Ruchi Choudhary, Department of Engineering

Built environments of future cities will need to cope with climate change and more intricate energy demands. But is it possible to model simulations at a city scale, in real life, before costly implementation? In this talk, Dr Ruchi Choudhary from the Engineering Dept at the University of Cambridge, will talk about ways to leverage data science and simulation to support energy-efficient built environments in the real world.

Energy models of built environments are known to be poor representations of their actual counterparts owing to a combination of human actions and physical forces interacting in highly varying ways. Dr Choudhary’s vision is to bring the capability of digital twinning to energy modelling of built environments in ways that are transformative and have lasting impact. She will focus on a couple of areas of her team’s work:

• Urban farming: Integrating urban farms within dense environments has the potential to utilise waste infrastructure and resources within cities with wider societal benefits. In a unique partnership, this work will track the environment of the world’s first underground farm in London, located in tunnels designed as a WW2 air raid shelters in the 1940s.
• Digital tools for resilient energy planning: This work will develop tools to support implementation of energy policies in cities. It will integrate high-dimensional data that span environmental features, physical form and land-use, socio-demographics, and economics to analyse cities spatially.

Registration: www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/events/cambridge-network-events/built_environment
(This event is FREE to anyone to attend but prior booking is essential.)

Agenda:
12.15pm: Arrival and networking
12.30-1.15pm: Talk and Q&A
1.30pm: End

Dr Ruchi Choudhary is Professor of Architectural Engineering in the Engineering Department at University of Cambridge. She specializes in simulation methods for predicting energy demand of the built environment. She is leading the research group on Digital Twins of Built Environment at the Alan Turing Institute (2018-2021). At Cambridge, she leads the multi-disciplinary Energy Efficient Cities Initiative, initially funded by a Science & Innovation award at Cambridge. She is also co-Investigator of the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction. Her research spans simulation-based methodologies for energy management of buildings; uncertainty quantification in building simulation models; and multi-disciplinary interactions influencing energy use in cities.  She is leading projects on modelling underground heat and city-scale geothermal systems, urban farming, and end-use energy demand modelling. In 2019 she became fellow of the International Building Performance & Simulation Association (IBPSA). She is elected chair of IBPSA-England since 2018. She is on the editorial board of J. of Building Performance Simulation, BSER&T the CIBSE Journal, Sustainable Cities and Society, and ICE J. of Smart Infrastructure & Construction.