Quantifying the impact of urban wind sheltering on the building energy consumption

Abstract

Current building energy simulation approaches usually do not take into account the influence of the surrounding urban neighborhood on the energy consumption patterns. This study aims to address this limitation and quantify the impact of an urban neighborhood. Therefore, the current study develops and validates a framework using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and building energy simulations. The developed framework in this study relies on deriving wind multipliers for eight principal directions to adjust the wind velocity encountering the building of interest. The purpose of these wind multipliers is to adjust wind velocities in the weather data input files for building energy models. To support the developed framework, this study validated the simulated CFD temperatures with on-site measured data as well as compared the simulated heating and electricity consumptions with the metered energy consumptions. A comparison between the building energy simulation results using both the adjusted and original weather data indicates that the total building energy consumption decreased by 5%. Among the heat gain components, the infiltration component had the maximum percentage of reduction with 31% and 29% sensible cooling and heating decrease, respectively. Overall, even though the annual cooling energy demand increased, the energy demand decreased due to the decrease in the heating demand for the studied neighborhood located in the Northeastern USA.