Built environment

The Symposium, which encourages practitioners and researchers from industry and academia to share experience and new insight, will focus around the recognition that system and plant performance in the built environment is a global issue.

Speakers from both sides of the Atlantic will be presenting in a packed programme scheduled over the two days of the Symposium.

Professor Tim Dwyer, who has helped organise the content, says: "The Symposium will consider a range of topics that underpin the engineering assessment, design and operation of systems that integrate with the aim of delivering future cities that not only provide inhabitants with acceptable and maintainable conditions but strive to mitigate their environmental impact. 

"We have seen part of this challenge brought into sharp focus over the past 12 months with continued urban density growth in fast developing nations and incidents such as air quality issues in China, political and consumer reactions to rising energy costs in the UK, and the resilience of buildings in the freezing weather conditions recently experienced in North America.”

Touching on many pertinent issues therefore this year’s event is being supported by Catapult Future Cities, and will embrace a broad perspective of viewpoints around the central theme of building systems performance. Confirmed presentations include:  

• Walgreen’s Net-Zero Energy Store (case study presentation)
• Neural and cognitive correlates of human decision-making in domestic energy use (presentation paper)
• The application of wireless sensor networks for building energy modelling (poster presentation)
• Developing building archetypes for electrical load shifting assessment: analysis of Irish residential stock(presentation paper)
• Novel techniques for modelling energy demand in the built environment (presentation paper)
• Delivering an energy model for BREEAM and LEED – exposing what really matters (case study presentation)
• LEDs are the panacea- and other fairy tales (poster presentation)

Those wishing to attend and book a place at the Symposium can register at www.cibse.org/symposium2014 or email [email protected]

The event expands CIBSE President, George Adams’s Presidential address "Whole Life Thinking".  In this address he commented that engineers working in the built environment had an urgent responsibility to help reduce energy consumption and provide for adaptation of buildings and cities to respond to the challenges of climate change whilst accommodating the needs of rapidly growing populations.