CAREER: The Mechanics of Subsurface Urban Heat Islands

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will investigate the impact of rising temperatures in the subsurface of urban areas on the performance of soils and geotechnical structures, and create tools that will inform novel methods to design and protect civil infrastructure in present and future cities. The ground is warming at a fast rate in many urban areas worldwide due to heat flows radiating from buildings and underground transport – a phenomenon known as subsurface urban heat islands.

As the deformation of soils and geotechnical structures is critically affected by temperature variations, subsurface heat islands represent a silent hazard for urban areas. This project will add new scientific and educational dimensions to a fundamental subject affecting urban infrastructure through the creation, analysis, and interpretation of large datasets incorporating sensing, experiments, and computations.

The broader impacts of the research will shape an emerging, interdisciplinary field to develop transformative strategies to plan, design, and manage the underground of cities. Through an integrated educational and outreach plan, this project will inform and train the present and future engineering workforce on approaches to cope with the critical phenomenon of subsurface heat islands in cities across the world.

This research will shed light on the mechanics of subsurface urban heat islands, linking the mechanical response of soils subjected to temperature rise at the scale of the representative elementary volume with the response of geotechnical structures at the scales of individual buildings, city blocks, and districts. By leveraging a unique sensing network that monitors temperature in the subsurface of Chicago and extensive experimental work, this project will develop and validate physics-based and data-driven modeling tools to unravel the influence of subsurface urban heat islands on the deformation of the shallow underground.

The research has three objectives: (1) analyze the long-term, thermally induced deformations of soils underneath or around buildings and infrastructure due to subsurface heat islands; (2) investigate the long-term performance of geotechnical structures and the resulting impacts on buildings and infrastructure due to the thermally induced deformations of soils; and (3) predict the evolution and impacts of subsurface heat islands for different site-specific features. This project will engage a wide range of demographics on the pervasive phenomenon of subsurface urban heat islands through collaboration with the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and the Illinois Green Alliance.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.