Patrick Kastner

Cornell University | CU · College of Architecture, Art and Planning

The architectural community needs holistic, evidence-based planning tools to promote urban resilience in the face of global warming. To ensure maximum impact, simulation-driven microclimate analysis methods must be integrated early in the design process. With Eddy3D, we present a toolkit to simulate outdoor thermal comfort (OTC) metrics with a deco...

Outdoor thermal comfort simulation simulations rely on the mean radiant temperature (MRT) seen by pedestrians as an important input that remains difficult to compute. Especially for large urban models, computing relevant surface temperatures and radiation fluxes that make up the MRT is a daunting task in terms of simulation setup and the computatio...

With the impending issues regarding global warming, urban design is considered a key driver to improve the microclimate in cities. For public spaces, studies suggest that outdoor thermal comfort may be seen as a proxy for space usage, and in turn, its attractiveness to people. Although the topic has gained interest in recent years, the discussion s...

As work environments struggle to reopen during the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial to establish practical decision-aiding tools. While a strong emphasis has been placed on determining generic guidelines to reduce the risk of airborne viral spread, there is a lack of free and easy-to-use simulation workflows to quantify indoor air quality a...

The Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) has been linked to outdoor activity patterns and used to evaluate the effectiveness of urban interventions to improve thermal comfort. This study investigates how simulating the urban environment at increasing levels of physical accuracy impacts UTCI values along three cycling routes in Cambridge, Massachu...

As work environments struggle to reopen during the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is crucial to establish practical decision-aiding tools. While a strong emphasis has been placed on determining generic guidelines to reduce the risk of airborne viral spread, there is a lack of free and easy-to-use simulation workflows to quantify indoor air quality a...

### Code The model and code are available here: https://github.com/kastnerp/HeatFlux

Building energy modeling software generally comes with capable airflow network solvers for natural ventilation evaluation in multi-zone building energy models. These approaches rely on arrays of pressure coefficients representing different wind directions derived from simple box-shaped buildings without contextual obstructions. For urban or obstruc...

With the rise of awareness of health and well-being in cities, urban environmental analysis should expand from energy performance to new environmental quality-based considerations. The limited potential to annually evaluate outdoor thermal comfort, predominant among these considerations, has restricted the exploration of the interrelations between...

Although recent advancements in computational architecture show promising capabilities, it remains difficult for architects to conduct advanced simulations due to the limited software interoperability. For thermal bridging analyses, the architectural community traditionally relies on specific software tools that are not integrated into a CAD enviro...

Global warming and increasingly dense cities lead to poor outdoor thermal comfort that may not only be detrimental to our health and well-being but also decreases social and commercial activities. Although workflows for the analysis of thermal comfort exist, they have yet transitioned into the quotidian architectural design process. Our work-flow a...

For urban CFD simulations, it is considered a best practice to use a box-shaped simulation domain. Box-shaped domains, however, show drawbacks for airflow from several wind directions as remeshing and additional preprocessing steps become necessary. We introduce a routine to create a cylindrical mesh that expedites the simulation of arbitrary wind...

Energy modeling packages such as EnergyPlus and TRNSYS come with capable airflow network solvers for natural ventilation evaluation in multi-zone building energy models. These approaches rely on pressure coefficient arrays of different wind directions based on simple box-shaped buildings without contextual obstructions. For specific sites, however,...

For environmental CFD simulations, it is considered best practice to use a box-shaped wind tunnel as simulation domain. A box-shaped wind tunnel, however, shows drawbacks when it comes to simulating air flow from several wind directions-remeshing and additional preprocessing steps may be necessary and can be considerable time constraints. We utiliz...

With increased awareness of sustainability, natural ventilation has become a strategy to reduce energy consumption in the built environment while providing comfortable indoor air quality. The main aim of this thesis was to apply the CFD software OpenFOAM, to investigate the wind-induced natural ventilation potential of classrooms. Relevant ventilat...

In the last decades, the String-Ribbon technique has been shown as an alternative process to produce multi crystalline silicon wafers for the photovoltaic industry. Different researches showed that one can affect and control the wafer quality by varying the process parameters. In this work, four ribbon wafers with obvious structural differences wer...