A Generalization of Building Clusters in an Urban Wind Field Simulated by CFD

Abstract

The urban climate has a critical influence on developing sustainable cities, and one important factor is the urban wind environment. Moreover, refining urban wind fields is required for the quantitative assessment of urban wind environments. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a powerful tool for modeling the wind flow characteristics in urban areas. Although CFD has been widely used in various fields, its use for simulating urban wind fields has limitations because of the complexity of urban building models and the high computational workload. Accordingly, we consider the generalization parameters in the vertical and horizontal directions based on the CFD results and the building topology based on the state of the building nodes. We perform a two-dimensional generalization of building clusters, conduct spatial analysis in a geographic information system (GIS), and generate three-dimensional models. This generalization scheme is applied to Meiling Street in Jinjiang City, Fujian Province, China. The results indicate that the generalization decreases the number of buildings from 7003 to 3367 and the computation time from 11 h and 26 min to 10 h and 25 min. The computation efficiency is improved by 8.89%, with 1.85% changes in the average wind speed ratio. This scheme substantially improves the computational efficiency of urban wind field CFD simulations by reducing the geometric model’s complexity without compromising the accuracy. This strategy is suitable for simulating large-scale urban wind fields.