A longitudinal 3D control-Volume study to quantify energy- and mass-Balance changes for Urban Sustainable redevelopment (VBUS)

Keeping urban areas vibrant and productive relies on redeveloping older, underused or neglected neighborhoods. To guide redevelopment efforts, planners must understand how changes affect economic and social activity. However, there is little information on how urban changes affect the temperature, humidity and air quality of local environments. This project will close this knowledge gap by studying the redevelopment of a city block in Salt Lake City. The team will use measurements and numerical models to examine how the redevelopment affects the local environment. The data and results from numerical models will help urban planners understand how different types of urban change affect human comfort, pollution exposure, and building energy use. The results will also help evaluate the economic and social tradeoffs associated with these changes. Furthermore, this project will foster collaboration between city officials, residents, and students at the University of Utah. This project will create a new understanding of transport processes in geometrically complex environmental systems. This will be accomplished by using a paired physical and digital twin control-volume approach through a longitudinal study of a neighborhood-scale project. Field and modeling studies will center on the `Fleet Block' project in downtown Salt Lake City. Data collection will start after the razing of existing buildings and continue through new construction and occupation. A high-resolution measurement array consisting of a centralized eddy-covariance tower and 16 low-cost stations will be deployed around the city block. New transport models will be created, tested, and used to identify components of the renewal process that strongly affect the environment and to generalize the findings beyond Salt Lake City. The experiment will measure the volume integrated energy, moisture, and scalar (particulate and ozone) budgets over a range of length scales. Additionally, a new Lagrangian transport model for conserved scalars will enable high-resolution longitudinal evaluation of urban landscape changes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2505869 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: James Stoll | Institution: University of Utah, SALT LAKE CITY, UT | Award Amount: $469,920 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2505869 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2505869.html