International Wind Engineering seminars 2020/21

Purpose

Because of the Covid19 pandemic, opportunities for the international wind engineering community to meet physically were very much restricted in 2020 and 2021. To enable the community to continue to interact with each other, at least in a virtual way, the University of Birmingham organised a series six seminars via Zoom from October 2020 to March 2021.  These were sponsored by the IAWE and had a significant international audience. Each seminar lasted around an hour and a half to two hours, and consisted of a main speaker for around 30 minutes followed by further short contributions or a panel debate with opportunities for online discussion by those attending.

Programme and Keynote speakers

(Links are to pdfs containing abstracts, biographies and in some cases discussion summaries)

Seminar 1. Thursday October 8th 2020 — Tornadoes – research and design (Prof Greg Kopp, University of Western Ontario)

Seminar 2. Thursday November 5^th  2020  – Indoor and outdoor ventilation and dispersion (Prof Bert Blocken, Eindhoven University, The Netherlands; KU Leuven, Belgium)

Seminar 3. Thursday December 3rd 2020 – Modeling the Dynamics of Tall Buildings Under Winds: From Historical Perspective to Recent Advances and Beyond  (Prof Ahsan Kareem, University of Notre Dame)

Seminar 4. Thursday January 7^th  2021 – Developments in bridge aerodynamics (Prof John Owen, University of Nottingham)

Seminar 5. Thursday February 11^th  2021. Wind loading code developments. (Svend Ole Hansen, Svend Ole Hansen ApS).

Seminar 6. Thursday March 4^th 2021 – Wind-related Disaster Risk Reduction: Current Status and Future Prospects (Prof Yukio Tamura, Chongqing University)

Presentation recordings

Reflections

Some reflections on how the series of seminars was organised and received are given in the blog post International Wind Engineering seminars 2020/21 – some reflections, which includes attendance statistics and considerations for similar future events.