COLDKSY.CN – Professor Lu Xinzheng, Dean of the Institute of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Engineering at Tsinghua University and winner of Xplorer Prize in 2019, uses 4R (Robustness, Redundancy, Resourcefulness，Rapidity) to describe a city’s resistance in crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic. (In Chinese, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ockDT94LJaJxvOjI_BzVPA,)
Specifically, Robustness refers to the existing resources, such as the medical response capacity, Redundancy means the back-up and alternative solutions, such as the make-shift hospitals rapidly built, Resourcefulness is about the access to resources for response and after-crisis recovery, and Rapidity indicates the swiftness and effectiveness.
China still faces daunting challenges to improve the risk response amid the rapid urbanization, meaning a lot of people migrating to ill-prepared large cities. Finding the solution needs a scenario simulation that is roughly physics-based and data-driven. As China’s big cities have never experienced large earthquake since the Tangshan Earthquake in 1996, the data-driven approach, despite a great prospect along with AI rise, cannot meet the actual needs.
Lu’s team has made progress in physics-based approach, with the scenario simulation and seismic damage prediction of Beijing CBD subjected to the 1679 Sanhe-Pinggu M8.0 Earthquake.
Another example of application is to improve the airborne hazard control of the make-shift hospitals in Wuhan for COVID-19 cases. To minimize secondary pollution caused by the air-exhausting system of these hospitals, the physics-based modelling helps simulate the air spread mechanism and thus improves the decision-making more informed. The following shows improved performance of the left optimized plan.
