Solar chimney street-lighting pole for ventilating polluted urban areas

Abstract

The increasing air pollution in built environment streets represents a serious health hazard, particularly for pedestrians. This paper presents a novel design of a solar chimney street-lighting pole (SCSLP) that guides away polluted air from the near-surface space to an upper space in street environments. The proposed system creates an updraft air movement through the convection of air heated by passive solar energy gained from the wall and solar collectors of the SCSLP. The current study investigated the performance of the proposed system through ANSYS CFX simulation (SIM) capabilities. The airflow rates and other relevant parameters were calculated and analysed for two selected materials and four geometric configurations of the SCSLP. The results showed that the SCSLP was successful in creating an updraft air movement of 6.970m3/min at 8:35 am on a typical summer day in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The performance of the SCSLP was mainly improved by increasing its number of solar collectors, and the thermal conductivity and emissivity of the composed material. The installation of numerous SCSLPs can create a large-scale air ventilation that would drive fresh air from nearby areas to replace the street’s pedestrian-level polluted air, thus providing people with cleaner air to breathe.