CHAPEL HILL, May 19, 2010–The Fifth International Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering ( CWE2010) will bring more than 300 experts from over 30 countries to Chapel Hill to discuss computational wind engineering issues that impact homeland security, sustainable energy, building design, large bridge design, urban design, mitigation of severe storms, and a host of other issues.

CWE2010 convenes May 23 – 27 at UNC Chapel Hill’s Friday Center for Continuing Education and will include workshops, panel discussions, paper presentations, posters, plenary sessions and special events. The symposium is co-hosted by  HYPERLINK “http://www.renci.org” RENCI, the Institute for the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill, and UNC’s  Center for the Study of Natural Hazards and Disasters.

“The symposium is a chance for computational wind engineers to meet face-to-face and discuss the latest research and technical innovations in wind engineering,” said Alan Huber, an adjunct faculty member at the Institute for the Environment and chair of CWE2010. “The discussion is technical, but our work touches on many of society’s most important problems, from how to design the best buildings, cars, bridges and wind turbines to understanding how contaminants disperse through the air.”

Technical papers to be presented at the conference will discuss computational wind engineering applications related to the dynamics of severe storms, aerial agriculture pest management, transport and dispersion of pollutants and toxins, natural ventilation methods, vehicle aerodynamics, wind loads on buildings, fire modeling, wind interactions with large structures such as bridges and cables, urban environments, wind energy production and effect, and more.

The International Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering is held quadrennially by the International Association for Wind Engineering and the regional wind engineering association in the host country (the  American Association for Wind Engineering). For more on the conference, visit the conference website at  http://www.cwe2010.org, where there are links to the program booklet, schedule of presentations, and presentation abstracts.

Registration is now open for the Fifth International Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering (CWE2010) to be held at the Friday Center for Continuing Education in Chapel Hill May 23-27.

Scientists, academics, technologists, architects and engineers from around the world are encouraged to register by March 1 to take advantage of the early bird discount. Students pay an even smaller registration fee and the National Science Foundation will reimburse some expenses for students attending U.S. institutions. For registration details and an online registration form, see http://www.cwe2010.org/registration.html

The symposium, hosted by RENCI, the UNC Center for the Study of Natural Hazards and Disasters, and the University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment, will provide a platform for discussing and exchanging the latest information on all computational wind engineering topics, including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations used in wind engineering. Each CWE symposium reflects the scientific advances in the developing CWE sciences as well as the rapid advances in high performance computing hardware and software used by wind engineers.

The theme for CWE2010 is CWE Applications for Homeland and Societal Security. Theme topics include natural and human-caused hazards and disasters, linking human health effects and property damage with CWE, simulation of meteorological phenomena, fires in buildings, cities and forests, use of CWE in developing wind energy systems and finding the optimal sites for wind energy systems, and much more.

The conference expects to offer more than 300 oral and poster presentations. The planning committee has already accepted some topics for presentation. Abstracts for those presentations—ranging from fire modeling to model development to transport, dispersion and deposition of pollutants—are available on the CWE2010 website.

The International Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering is convened every four years by the International Association of Wind Engineering in collaboration with one its three regional wind engineering organizations. The American Association for Wind Engineering is the partner for the 2010 Symposium.