Comprehensive comparisons of RANS, LES, and experiments over cross-ventilated building under sheltered conditions

Abstract

The use of RANS (Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes) simulations to study airflow over cross-ventilated buildings has been widely performed under both isolated and sheltered conditions. For a sheltered environment, great efforts still need to be made as few studies have been conducted on cross-ventilated buildings, located far downstream of the urban morphology. Therefore, in this study, a series of simulations with different turbulence models were conducted to determine the performance in predicting the external and internal airflows of a cross-ventilated building under sheltered conditions and to evaluate the ventilation performance. Two urban building dispositions were considered, namely square (SQ) and staggered (ST) layouts. The evaluation of the velocity profiles was performed in the vertical and horizontal planes of the target building to systematically determine the accuracy of each model. The qualitative results showed that several RANS models are able to generate the main features of the external (in-canyon) and internal flows. In addition, the quantitative evaluations of the internal flow showed that the vertical velocity in the vertical plane and the lateral velocity in the horizontal plane are poorly predicted in the SQ array. Furthermore, the prediction of the streamwise velocity in the horizontal plane of the ST array is not satisfactory. The RANS ventilation rates are comparable to the large-eddy simulation (LES) results for certain models in the SQ array, but the deviations are large for all models in the case of the ST array, with the highest predicted ventilation rate being 40% lower compared to LES.