Research group "Impact of climate change"

Climate change poses non-negligible risks to the built environment. Global warming and the changes in the climate system, e.g. heat waves, extreme rainfall, floods, landslides, droughts and water scarcity, increasingly affect safety and resilience of the built environment, entailing consequent risks posed to human individuals and the general public. Aiming at mitigating the risks, the goal of this research group is to analyze the effects of climatic changes to the built environment, such as buildings and civil infrastructure, and to develop sustainable measures towards structural adaptations of the built environment to the impacts of the changed climate. Emphasis is put on adaptations with respect to static and dynamic behavior, indoor comfort, and energy efficiency of residential and industrial buildings. The research group is composed of five chairs at Bauhaus University Weimar: Complex Structures (Junior Professor Dr. Lars Abrahamczyk, Coordinator), Computing in Civil Engineering (Professor Dr. Kay Smarsly), Building Physics (Professor Dr. Conrad Völker), Modeling and Simulation of Structures (Professor Dr. Guido Morgenthal), and Steel Construction (Professor Dr. Matthias Kraus). The transfer processes to the Thuringian economy are supported by a project-accompanying industry advisory board.

Impact of climate change on thermal comfort and energy efficiency

Within the research group, the Chair of Computing in Civil Engineering, together with the Chair of Building Physics, in their sub project investigate the effects of climate change on thermal comfort and energy efficiency of buildings. The anthropogenic climate change, e.g. due to summer heat waves, causes higher air and radiation temperatures in buildings, entailing decreased thermal comfort, thus decreased work efficiency, of users. In the sub project of the aforementioned chairs, wireless sensor networks and distributed artificial intelligence algorithms will be developed to achieve an IoT-based cyber-physical system serving as a demonstrator for the illuminating the interrelations between climate change and thermal comfort/energy efficiency.