Effect of built form on local wind characteristics, a case of tropical savanna climate in India

Abstract

Passive techniques play a substantial role in regulating the indoor environmental quality of a building, especially in the tropics. Proper air movement is necessary for warm and humid indoors by utilising the local wind pattern. Many factors influence and alter the wind character of a region. Any built form has a significant influence on the wind and vice versa. This research extensively studies the effects of wind when it encounters different built and unbuilt spaces of an office building in India’s tropical savanna climate. Applications such as Building Information Modelling (Autodesk Revit) and Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation (Autodesk CFD) are used for analysis. The impacts on the local wind character at chosen wind path timings are studied in detail to arrive at the conclusions. Various effects like wind acceleration, corner jetting, channelling, funnelling, windbreak and cumulative effects are observed as occurring due to the influence of the building’s form on the local wind. These effects increased the wind velocity from 10kmph up to 19kmph and decreased up to 6kmph. The study concludes by arriving at several considerations while developing built forms that help to reduce negative impacts and improve positive impacts on aspects like aerodynamics, user comfort, impact on surroundings, the microclimate and structural wind loads.