Indoor Air Quality: Air pollution “is the biggest environmental risk to [human] health” according to the World Health Organization. While the majority of air-pollution related deaths are strongly associated with a person’s age and country of origin’s economic status, poor indoor air quality (IAQ) has been correlated with health impacts ranging from transient symptoms such as difficulty concentrating, and headaches, to chronic, more serious symptoms such as asthma and cancer in both developing and developed nations. IAQ diminishes as levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particulate matter (PM) increase, each with measurable impacts to human health. The potential for Indoor Air Quality issues and related health impacts to be addressed through building-integrated phytoremediation systems is an active and evolving area of research.

Building Integrated Wind Energy: Building-integrated wind energy is gaining considerable traction, as evinced by a number of high-profile projects around the world. Among the strategies for integration, using the building form to augment wind flows onto the turbines can significantly increase energy production, compared to using the buildings merely as towers for mounting the turbines. However, most of the existing proposals for this form-based augmentation utilize large non-yawing wind turbines.

This severely limits their applicability, especially in urban environments where the wind flows are typically turbulent and variable. Additionally, the structural and safety issues that result from these strategies require significant mitigation measures. This research and development area investigates the viability of deploying smaller distributed turbines mounted on the exterior of aerodynamically shaped buildings, based on the concept of the Wind Assisted Rotor Platform (WARP). The WARP system uses saddle ridge shaped modules to amplify and channel wind flows onto attached turbines. As part of this study, different WARP-based configurations are being evaluated against other comparable wind augmentation options for single tower buildings on the basis of potential energy yields and usable floor space area. The results show that the new approach can generate up to 150% greater energy yield than the next highest alternative. Further analysis of the proposed approach also suggests that it can allow for harnessing a wide range of wind directions, while freeing up valuable interior space, offering it huge advantages in variety of design situations.”