Pedestrian-Level Urban Wind Flow Enhancement with Wind Catchers
Name
atmosphere-08-00159-v2.pdf
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3.98 MB
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Nazarian, Negin
Chew, Lup Wai
Norford, Leslie Keith
Date Issued
August 2017
Journal
Atmosphere
Publisher
MDPI AG
Citation
Chew, Lup et al. "Pedestrian-Level Urban Wind Flow Enhancement with Wind Catchers." Atmosphere, 8, 9 (August 2017): 159 © 2017 The Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Dense urban areas restrict air movement, causing airflow in urban street canyons to be much lower than the flow above buildings. Boosting near-ground wind speed can enhance thermal comfort in warm climates by increasing skin convective heat transfer. We explored the potential of a wind catcher to direct atmospheric wind into urban street canyons. We arranged scaled-down models of buildings with a wind catcher prototype in a water channel to simulate flow across two-dimensional urban street canyons. Velocity profiles were measured with Acoustic Doppler Velocimeters. Experiments showed that a wind catcher enhances pedestrian-level wind speed in the target canyon by 2.5 times. The flow enhancement is local to the target canyon with little effect in other canyons. With reversed flow direction, a “reversed wind catcher” has no effect in the target canyon but reduces the flow in the immediate downstream canyon. The reversed wind catcher exhibits a similar blockage effect of a tall building amid an array of lower buildings. Next, we validated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of all cases with experiments and extended the study to reveal impacts on three-dimensional ensembles of buildings. A wind catcher with closed sidewalls enhances maximum pedestrian-level wind speed in three-dimensional canyons by four times. Our results encourage better designs of wind catchers to increase wind speed in targeted areas.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos8090159
