3 ms·

Climate Change / Waste Management / Many "Green" issues

Regardsyjc 8y ago
Adding to climate change- water management. Cape Town, South Africa had over 10 years to find a solution to their water problem but delayed. I read that Bangalore, India might have used up to 80% of their groundwater... Water management can be solvable and lack of clean water affects 2 billion people. Not only that but climate change will dramatically affect coastal cities and couple hundred more million people especially in Asia. I've been researching water management lately trying to figure out what potential solutions I could work on but haven't figured anything out yet. There are sensors for identifying leaks or testing water. Better graphene filters for desalination. Problems with microplastics/pharmaceuticals in tap water that might be able to be fixed through reverse osmosis (RO) systems... I've considered importing a bunch of RO systems and starting an RO business to learn more. I recently learned that there might be 6 carcinogenic chemicals in New York City tap water that is unregulated and a byproduct of the bleach they use to sanitize the water... Water management is directly connected with population growth. When people move due to water scarcity or conflict from water scarcity it will only exacerbate cities more. Currently reading The Big Thirst and looking forward to reading Living with Water Scarcity.
- imhoguy 8y ago
  And for dry places with sun abundance the solar powered reverse osmosis is the future. Absolutely interesting topic!
saeranv 8y ago
One I've been thinking about: the building design industry's ability to couple mechanical energy systems to passive energy strategies and building geometry/material. Mechanical engineers have figured out all sorts of clever ways to couple different parts of the HVAC system together ensure maximum efficiency. Air is recirculated, if air can't be recirculated, just the sensible heat or moisture is captured and added to supply air. There are increasingly complicated loops of supply and return cooling/heating water to reduce the energy cost of exhausting waste heat or absorb heat from outside conditions. All of which is calculated with building energy models, and can easily be parameterized and optimized for specific load scenarios. And yet, anything that is the architect's domain is never as tightly coupled. So you end up with mech engineers recommending these sort of plug-and-play systems, architects implementing fairly generic "sustainability" strategies, and the efficiency gains from coupling the two are lost. Off the top of my head, here are some reasons for this (beyond just the disciplinary division between mechanical engineers and architects): - lack of sophisticated computational geometry methods that plug into the energy simulators - the huge upfront cost of developing a mechanistic simulation models - the dependency of energy modeling on complex fluid modeling and the prohibitively huge computational cost associated with that - the inability to capture local microclimate conditions that can inform hyper-localized building design - the lack of a database of building energy models with accurate geometry/material options that would allow architects to predict energy impacts of geometry - the general ambiguity of classifying "shapes" and "geometry", it seems impossible to break down geometry into feature vectors for ML or statistical analysis. I don't know if this actually has a huge energy impact, but my instinct is that there's a lot of potential "coupling" that could occur that is left on the table because the building design industry tends to silo the active/renewable energy systems. Granted, there's plenty of activity in the industry around this, but at this stage it's all based on the idea of hooking up existing state-of-the-art simulation modelers to CAD geometry modelers, and then doing fairly simple optimization design solution space searching between the two. As the divide between the two software "silos" (energy simulation/CAD models) starts to break down, and more sophisticated methods to break down the solution space trickles down into the industry from ML/data science, I think this should lead to a scenario where we can implement more tightly coupled building designs.

Adding to climate change- water management. Cape Town, South Africa had over 10 years to find a solution to their water problem but delayed. I read that Bangalore, India might have used up to 80% of their groundwater... Water management can be solvable and lack of clean water affects 2 billion people. Not only that but climate change will dramatically affect coastal cities and couple hundred more million people especially in Asia. I've been researching water management lately trying to figure out what potential solutions I could work on but haven't figured anything out yet. There are sensors for identifying leaks or testing water. Better graphene filters for desalination. Problems with microplastics/pharmaceuticals in tap water that might be able to be fixed through reverse osmosis (RO) systems... I've considered importing a bunch of RO systems and starting an RO business to learn more. I recently learned that there might be 6 carcinogenic chemicals in New York City tap water that is unregulated and a byproduct of the bleach they use to sanitize the water... Water management is directly connected with population growth. When people move due to water scarcity or conflict from water scarcity it will only exacerbate cities more. Currently reading The Big Thirst and looking forward to reading Living with Water Scarcity.

imhoguy 8y ago
And for dry places with sun abundance the solar powered reverse osmosis is the future. Absolutely interesting topic!

saeranv 8y ago

One I've been thinking about: the building design industry's ability to couple mechanical energy systems to passive energy strategies and building geometry/material. Mechanical engineers have figured out all sorts of clever ways to couple different parts of the HVAC system together ensure maximum efficiency. Air is recirculated, if air can't be recirculated, just the sensible heat or moisture is captured and added to supply air. There are increasingly complicated loops of supply and return cooling/heating water to reduce the energy cost of exhausting waste heat or absorb heat from outside conditions. All of which is calculated with building energy models, and can easily be parameterized and optimized for specific load scenarios. And yet, anything that is the architect's domain is never as tightly coupled. So you end up with mech engineers recommending these sort of plug-and-play systems, architects implementing fairly generic "sustainability" strategies, and the efficiency gains from coupling the two are lost. Off the top of my head, here are some reasons for this (beyond just the disciplinary division between mechanical engineers and architects): - lack of sophisticated computational geometry methods that plug into the energy simulators - the huge upfront cost of developing a mechanistic simulation models - the dependency of energy modeling on complex fluid modeling and the prohibitively huge computational cost associated with that - the inability to capture local microclimate conditions that can inform hyper-localized building design - the lack of a database of building energy models with accurate geometry/material options that would allow architects to predict energy impacts of geometry - the general ambiguity of classifying "shapes" and "geometry", it seems impossible to break down geometry into feature vectors for ML or statistical analysis. I don't know if this actually has a huge energy impact, but my instinct is that there's a lot of potential "coupling" that could occur that is left on the table because the building design industry tends to silo the active/renewable energy systems. Granted, there's plenty of activity in the industry around this, but at this stage it's all based on the idea of hooking up existing state-of-the-art simulation modelers to CAD geometry modelers, and then doing fairly simple optimization design solution space searching between the two. As the divide between the two software "silos" (energy simulation/CAD models) starts to break down, and more sophisticated methods to break down the solution space trickles down into the industry from ML/data science, I think this should lead to a scenario where we can implement more tightly coupled building designs.