Geomatics | Bouwhouse Symposium

Everyone in Delft knows the feeling, you are casually biking to X and whoosh, your lifted of your seat by the wind. Why does this keep happening? Most know that EWI is the adversary here. But why does EWI create this large wind current? And how could we fix this issue? How do buildings and terrain interact with the wind? These are just some examples of questions we ask ourselves in Geomatics. To find the answer we would have to create digital 3D models of EWI and its surroundings. Afterwards, we can use Computational Fluid Dynamics to model how the wind travels. Using visualizations, we can gain a better understand what is happening. As can been seen in the image, a larger magnitude of wind is found at the higher buildings (the red area). Since it is a digital dataset, we can easily add other buildings or obstacles to see how this effects the wind flow.

EWI is just one of the many different architectural buildings build on the Mekelweg over the decades. For many BKer’s this is a wonder to behold, for others a thorn in the eye. It is not always easy to determine what impact a new architectural design might have on its surroundings. While the building might look wonderful in isolation, the effect its neighbours have is crucial to the overall design. City modelling can help us gain a better perspective of the impacts that new designs might have. While in the image the wind is the emphasis, we can replace this with detailed textures of the buildings granting us a realistic view of the area.

Another example can be recognised when you are walking towards a festival, you can already hear the bass kicking from far away, even though you can't see anything yet, or when you are in an empty room, you might hear an echo of your voice. We all know that sound reflects upon surfaces, but did you know sound does not necessarily travel straight, it can bend around buildings and move through walls. At Geomatics we ask ourselves, how does sound move throughout our cities, our rural areas, how does it interact with buildings?

At last, if you have recently used Google maps, you might have noticed, if you zoom in far enough, the buildings start to become 3D objects. These models are automatically generated from satellite imagery. While these might be of low quality we can enhance these by using data created by using laser scanning from an airplane or car. Generating these 3D models is not only useful for you when using google maps, but they are used for a wide variety of studies where the shape of the terrain, and the buildings we put on top of this influence us and the environment.

An article written by Constantijn Dinklo, Geomatics student, Board member geos