Transcriber: Els De Keyser Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Ladies and gentlemen, the buildings you see here are very different.
There is a town hall, there is a big ministry building,
there is an airport terminal, there is a head office of a big bank
and a small bank, and an office of a broadcasting company
and also two old buildings from the last century,
a museum in The Hague
and the head office of an important Dutch trading company
from the former century.
These buildings were built in the 20's and the 30's of the last century.
Well, these are very different buildings
and yet they have one thing in common:
the airconditioning systems in these buildings were designed by me and by my staff.
(Laughter)
Everybody can talk about airconditioning
but few have ever seen the heart of an air-conditioning.
And what you see here on this slide
is the very heart of an airconditioning plant:
huge air handling units which cool and dry your air
or heat it up and humidify it.
Well, this has always been important work for me.
This was my joy, this was my passion and my life,
to design this kind of things.
Ordinary people are not allowed to go in there.
And architects also don't like those systems.
Architects dislike airconditioning, in fact.
It costs a lot of space.
They hate the pipes and the ducts.
They hide them very carefully above the false ceilings and in insulating shafts.
And at last, airconditioning costs a lot of money.
It has to be funded from the construction budget,
and that's their budget.
Then next, do people like airconditioning?
Well, they generally do not.
They hate the noise of the fans,
the draft of the cold air that is coming into them,
they don't like the air quality,
they think the inside air quality is not as good as the outside air quality.
They complain about dry air.
And, well, energy consumption of air conditioning is rather high.
So that's also not so very good for air conditioning.
So having a relationship with architects that is a love-and-hate relation,
and customers that do not like my products,
you can imagine that I had a very hard and difficult life.
(Laughter)
So, should I have given up or is there a solution to this problem?
Well, can we learn from nature?
What you see here is a termite hill.
I've seen lots of termite hills in Africa, in Kenya.
They are very large buildings they build for themselves.
Inside that building, that mound,
they grow a fungus.
The fungus is their primary food source.
The fungus grows best at a temperature of 30°C.
So the temperature in the mound has to be kept at 30°C,
while at the outside, it's 50° in daytime and the sun is shining on the hill,
and at night time, the temperature can go down to about zero.
So, can we learn from some -- could we design a building
like those termites do?
Well, we don't know for sure,
but I think termites do not split up the design of these mounds
and architecture [and] engineering. They build it together.
(Laughter) (Chuckles)
I say: as far as we know! (Chuckles) (Applause)
And I think termites are very satisfied
with the endoclimate in their buildings.
So could we imitate this, the way termites do this?
It's called the biomimicry principle.
Could we learn from them and build a building in reality?
Could we make buildings in the human world
as a machine for natural air conditioning?
Then I come to the words architect and engineer - different minds.
Architects are artistic, intuitive and creative
and engineers logical, rational and well,
I must say that architects sometimes have very fantastic ideas
but they leave the quality of the endoclimate to the engineer.
The engineer is always responsible.
So, different minds.
I have learned the mind of the architect rather well
during my career.
About 20 years ago I was appointed as a guest lecturer
at Delft University, at the faculty of architecture
and I got to know the minds of architects even better.
And then I got a new idea.
Can we build a building with natural air conditioning
in the way termites do it?
How do the termites do it?
Well, they very carefully open and close
vents that let warm air out
and let cool air in, and opposite.
Could we do that in the same way as the termites do it?
And could we, by doing so, have natural air conditioning, avoiding fans,
could we, by doing so, probably, maybe, hopefully,
make a zero energy building
and a building where the endoclimate
is more like the outdoor climate and people are more satisfied with it?
Well, this was the idea.
On a morning, I awoke, during a holiday,
and I said: well, but what's the title for it?
What about Earth, Wind and Fire?
That was the working title for this investigation. (Laughter)
I wrote a research proposal on that.
And I applied for funding from the Dutch government.
Well, the Dutch government took their time --
about two years -- (Laughter)
but at last, I got about a million of euros.
That's a lot of money. The good old times, you can say.
It is tax money.
So you all contributed to my research.
Thank you very much. (Laughter) (Applause)
So when I got the funding for my research, the research could start.
It started in the early summer of 2007.
My wife, Ilona, was recovering from major surgery after chemotherapy.
About 20% of the women survive ovarian cancer.
I was convinced that she would belong to that 20%.
Then in a week in November came the message from the hospital
that the cancer was back and there was no more hope for her.
I was a caregiver, so I had to divide my time
between Earth, Wind and Fire and Ilona.
But you can understand that that was a difficult task.
And at the end of the year, my inspiration and ambition
had gone so much that I thought:
well, I'd better give up Earth, Wind and Fire,
forget about that and concentrate on my wife.
But she didn't agree with me.
She said, "Ben, your work, your job
has always been your passion and your life, your joy,
so go on with that.
And when I'm no longer here,
you still have a wonderful purpose in your life.
And that little voice, I still hear it after so many years.
So she died in February 2008.
For a couple of months, I did nothing at Earth Wind and Fire, but then,
slowly, I restarted.
(Ramses Shaffy singing:) Sing, fight, cry, pray, laugh, work and admire.
(Applause)
This is the title page of my thesis,
stating that singing, fighting, crying, praying, laughing and working,
I restarted the research
and was more and more surprised by the results.
As a principal investigator
I put together a team of researchers.
Scientists of the University of Delft and the University of Eindhoven.
A fantastic combination of old and young,
of trained intuition -- that's me, of course -- (Laughter)
and open minds -- that's the researchers.
Also practical experience, but also scientific expertise.
There was a fantastic team to do this work.
You see a picture here.
It's part of my research team and also one of my promotors.
We also had a project advisory team
of people from the building industry.
Once or two times a year we came together
and they said what they thought about the progress of the research.
Well, this was the idea: Earth, Wind and Fire.
What you see here, is a cross-section of an office building.
The wind comes from the left in this case,
but it's wind direction independent,
so it's not important to place the building in the wind direction,
but there are overhangs at roof level
and the wind blowing to the facade
is caught by the overhangs and is entering the building.
Part of the wind is used for air conditioning of the building,
and part of it is used for energy production
by wind turbines that are not on this picture.
At the left side, you see the climate cascade
where the fresh air enters.
At the top of the climate cascade
cold water is sprayed, water of 13° C
That cold water cools the air in summer
and preheats the air in winter.
The temperature of 13° C,
we can get that from cold from the soil.
The soil is about 11 to 12° C,
so we don't need chillers, we can get the cold from the soil to cool the air.
Then the air is cooled, for instance,
in summer from 28 degrees outside to 18 degrees --
about 10 degrees, we can cool that.
At the top of the climate cascade, the water is sprayed.
At the foot of the climate cascade, pressure is built up.
We need some pressure to distribute the air
into the building.
Because of the weight difference between the water air mixture
inside the climate cascade
and the surrounding,
there is a negative thermal draught,
so we have positive pressure at the foot.
At the other side of the building,
we have the solar chimney.
The sun shines into the chimney,
the air is heated up,
is rising, it's thermal draught,
and at the foot of the solar chimney,
there's an underpressure.
That underpressure exhausts the fresh air
that is distributed by the climate cascade.
At the top of the solar chimney,
we have a heat recovery system.
It would be a pity, of course, to leave all the energy that's in the air.
It's not only the solar energy
but also all the energy that's produced in the building.
the heat from lighting, from people, from computers and so on.
All that heat is recovered by water,
that water is heated and stored into the soil beneath the building.
We can use that in winter to heat the building.
Then the air is going up through what is called a venturi ejector.
This room is like a venturi.
When wind blows through the roof, the wind speed is accelerated
and there is an underpressure in the heart of the roof.
By that underpressure, the wind, the air is removed from the building.
This works all naturally.
We only need one small pump
to pump the water up to the sprayers.
That was the idea.
I concocted it myself in a very coarse way.
But it has to be calculated, of course.
So the scientists from Eindhoven and Delft
made very sophisticated computer models.
But what is the value of a computer model?
It always needs to be tested.
So the next step was that we built
physical models, physical mock-ups.
In those mock-ups, we did all the measurements
and based on those measurements in the physical mock-ups,
we could validate the computer models.
So we have very reliable computer models now.
It turned out to be really good.
We have very reliable models.
It's amazing that you can make a CFD simulation
of hundreds of thousands of water droplets --
what is the cooling effect? -- but it can be done,
and it was really fantastic to do that.
You see the tester here, a mock-up of the solar chimney.
It's eleven meters high and two meters wide.
For one year, many points were measured:
the solar radiation, but also the temperatures inside the solar chimney,
the air velocities and so on, and on the basis of all those measurements
we could validate and verify the computer models.
And it turns out that we have a reliable computer model for that.
We did not only build a test mock-up for the solar chimney,
but also for the climate cascade and for the ventec roof
which is tested in the wind tunnel.
Well, the question is: will people like natural air conditioning?
Well, most probably, yes!
There's no noise, there's no draft,
the air is not so cold, it's about 18° C,
there is outdoor air quality, the best quality you can have,
there's no dry air and the system uses very little energy.
But of course the building itself
consumes energy, because of the lighting and so on, and the computers.
So we need to provide for the energy consumption of the building itself.
So the next idea was to produce the energy for the building in the building itself.
We designed a power plant on a roof,
a power plant using wind and using sun
to produce energy --
sun by PV roofing and wind by wind turbines.
This is a picture of such a power roof.
It's an energy power plant for the building.
You see the wind turbines in the pressure room
and you see the ventec roof
and a wind turbine can be situated in there as well.
In the best case, we can produce all the energy we need in the building.
This is an exploded view of the roof.
Here is the entrance of the climate cascade.
You see the turbines running.
Again.
Then at last -- the idea of Earth, Wind and Fire
was to apply it in newly designed buildings.
That can be done: you can design a building so
that it is ideally suited for the Earth, Wind and Fire concept,
but there is no big building production at the moment,
so I did a test, a virtual case study
on an existing building in Amsterdam.
This is the new view of the building.
This is the south facade.
We made a complete solar facade on the south.
You see the roof and the overhangs and the ventec roof.
Well, it can be done.
We calculated -- we tested, of course, but only virtually --
that by the Earth, Wind and Fire concept
you can reduce the energy consumption of the air conditioning
by about 40-60%, and the remaining energy we need,
can be produced in the power plant on the roof;
purely with nature.
So I can say that Earth, Wind and Fire is a multiple innovation.
In the first place, I think it's a social innovation,
because architects and engineers are cooperating so closely.
Architects are engaged in the design of the climate system
and they are also engaged in the problem of energy and indoor environment.
And that's of course very important.
And also for the people in the building you can call it a social innovation
because the indoor environment is better.
Scientists have proven many years ago that when the indoor environment is better,
the productivity of the office staff is improved as well.
And at last it is a technological innovation.
We have air conditioning without vents.
We can have zero energy buildings and that's of course fantastic.
We should do that in the future.
Some of my favorite statements:
the trouble with getting old it that one doesn't.
That means that your body gets old, but your mind doesn't get old.
Is that a problem? No, for me it's not a problem -- (Chuckles)
but that the body gets old is sometimes a problem.
The most wonderful youth is a youthful mind when you are no longer young.
That's my favorite saying. It's from a famous French philosopher.