Abstract
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been widely used in the simulation and analysis of community or urban wind environments. However, the CFD-based wind simulation of large-scale building groups usually consumes a lot of computing resources with high computing costs. To improve the efficiency of CFD-based wind simulation, this paper presents an experiment-based simplified method for the model of building groups. Two rectangular buildings are adopted as the basic unit and four control parameters (B/L, W/L, H/L, and D/L) are selected as the experiment factors to analyze the geometrical relationship of the two buildings. Note that L, W, and H, respectively, represent the windward edge length, width, and height of a building, B is building interval distance, and D is the distance between two building center axes. Then, a single factor experiment and an orthogonal experiment are designed and performed to determine the reasonable value range of each factor. Based on the experiment results and actual situation, the value ranges of four factors for the simplification of building group models are determined as follows: B/L∈{0, 1.5}, W/L∈{0, 2}, D/L∈{0, 0.25}, and H/L∈{0, 1}. Furthermore, a real case is presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed simplified method. The results indicate that the simplified method is able to improve the efficiency of CFD-based wind simulation of building groups, with the number of buildings decreasing from 620 to 395 (by 36.3%), and the number of tetrahedral grids decreasing from 8,832,199 to 7,766,778 (by 12.1%). Thus, this research contributes to the CFD-based wind simulation method of large-scale building groups and the analysis of the urban wind environment.
Highlights
Urban wind environment has attracted growing attention from urban planners
To determine the control parameters, we propose a basic building unit consisting of two identical rectangular buildings arranged along the wind direction, involving five variables, i.e., the dimensions of a building model (windward edge length (L), width (W), and height (H)) and the building group offsets (building interval distance (B) and distance between two building center axes (D))
W/L: according to the single factor experiment, W/L was positively correlated with △, the optimal value W/L 2. e effect of W/L on the experiment results was not significant and the value of W/L in actual building groups may be small; the value range of W/L can be extended to 0–2
Summary
Urban wind environment has attracted growing attention from urban planners. Previous research has shown that outdoor temperature is increased by 1.9°C with the wind speed decreasing from 1 m/s to 0.3 m/s, and the wind speed for thermal comfort in subtropical cities in summer is about 1.6 m/s [1]. The planning of urban wind environment has a significant impact on urban climate issues such as urban heat island effect, pollutant diffusion, usage of wind energy, and air quality [2,3,4]. Good wind environment contributes to a pleasant human living environment and plays an important role in constructing green ecological cities
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