Abstract
The energy transition to more sustainable forms is currently ongoing worldwide, because of the environmental impacts produced by the non-renewable energy sources employed in the last decades. Among the main alternatives, wind plays a key role and, nowadays, innovative instruments, such as small-scale turbines allow for installation of wind turbines in urban areas. Their energy potential assessment requires high-accuracy simulations of the turbulent flows in the urban canopy layer, which, in turn, require detailed information about the geometrical properties of the basic element to classify urban surfaces, i.e., the urban canyon, often not available. In this work, we propose a novel automatic method, based on Voronoi graph, to univocally identify urban canyons and to extract their geometrical parameters from online available GIS (Geographic Information System) data, and test it on four European cities that differ in size, story and location. Results show the capability of the method to identify the single urban canyon and to properly extract its geometrical parameters, which tend to assume similar values for the largest cities. Moreover, we first attempt to propose and test some curves to generally describe the data probability distribution, which may be useful for turbulence simulations for urban wind energy assessment and planning. The best results are found for the canyon aspect ratio.
Highlights
The evidence of the climate changes, with the exponentially increasing carbon dioxide concentration in atmosphere and the consequent global warming, has raised awareness among governments and international institutions of the importance of rapidly reaching climatic neutrality by completing the energetic transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources
As reported in the Introduction, the demand for distributed renewable energy production from wind sources can be met with the help of small-scale turbines installed over high buildings, and vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) are the best choice for wind energy exploitation in urban environment [1,2,3,4,5]
For wind energy potential assessment, numerical and laboratory simulations of urban boundary layer turbulence require a detailed description of geometric characteristics of the urban canopy in form of urban canyon parameters (UCP) [16,17]
Summary
The evidence of the climate changes, with the exponentially increasing carbon dioxide concentration in atmosphere and the consequent global warming, has raised awareness among governments and international institutions of the importance of rapidly reaching climatic neutrality by completing the energetic transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Wind is currently playing a key role [1,2] since the wind turbines have proven their effectiveness, their efficiency is continuously increasing, and related technology is under constant enhancement [3,4,5,6,7], even looking to urban areas applications [8,9,10]. The size of the wind turbines is continuously increasing because of the beneficial scale effects. The use of these devices is limited to farms located offshore or in sparsely populated rural areas. The implementation of distributed generator (smart-) grids over the urban area would have important advantages, such as low transmission losses and natural integration with the energy communities
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