Science Tours

Being the big hydrology nerd I am, when given the choice of taking tours to say, an outdoor conservation biology site, I actually chose to go on a fluid mechanics tour. Yup. Big nerd.

However, the tour totally inspired me! The environmental fluid mechanics lab is housed in the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building, Stanford's new energy and water efficient building, so first we learned about and walked through some of the building's features. On the south side, the windows have horizontal fins which are topped with a light colored surface. Guess why? That's right, a high albedo will reflect light back into the room, but the less direct light makes it less fierce. The building self-ventilates and maintains a temperature range of 68 to 75, making the air comfortable and high in quality. The 4-story building features four 4-story atriums.

All wood furniture comes from bamboo. The cement floor contains high percentage fly ash. Landscape is watered with lake water, the building is double plumped so toilets receive non-potable water, and on and on. The building uses 50% less energy and 90% less potable water than a similar building of normal design standards would. And they're not yet using rainwater harvesting (they claim it's not cost effective yet), and owing to some strange political pressure, only 1/3 of the urinals are waterless. Apparently there are also a lot of code difficulties that make building green difficult.

The guy giving the tour noted that the biggest obstacle is human behavior change. For example, the building has to have lights so that people can work at night, but it is hard to get people to leave the lights off during the day even when there is plenty of natural light. Of course, the lights turn off automatically after 20 minutes of no use, but this doesn't help when there are constantly people around.

Another cool thing about the building is that it houses a wide variety of programs and departments. However, the building is not organized in that way; rather it is divided by area of study - freshwater, oceans, land use, etc. Truly interdisciplinary! The environmental fluid mechanics guy works on a lot of studies related to coral with biogeochemists and marine ecologists and all sorts of other scientists. He isn't just cooped up with other engineers all day.

Speaking of fluid mechanics, I enjoyed learning about other applications for it besides freshwater stream systems and aquifers. Ocean and estuarine dynamics sound really neat too. And getting to play with wave machines and corals? Also exciting! And doing research from a boat in Australia? Phenomenal! I guess I should have expanded my fluid horizons...

The building also houses the Woods Institute for the Environment, another intriguing multidisciplanary research, training, and education center. Also check out Stanford's Environmental Portal. I think I have found my future academic home.