Numerical study of flow structure and pedestrian-level wind comfort inside urban street canyons

Abstract

In this work, the flow conditions are numerically investigated inside uniform and non-uniform street canyons well within the atmospheric boundary layer. The numerical simulations use the steady-RANS method with the near-wall modelling approach to simulate wall roughness at the boundary. With the aim of investigating both flow structure in broad terms and pedestrian comfort in the street canyon between parallel buildings, we test different canyon configurations with varied street width, building width and building height. Turbulent conditions are broadly expected to hold within the physically realistic range of Reynolds number of order 106 considered here, where we take the building height to be a characteristic length scale and the free stream velocity as the characteristic velocity. In addition to discussing the features of the canyon and wake flow, we investigate the effects of canyon geometry on pedestrian comfort by using the Extended Land Beaufort Scale for this purpose. We present and compare pedestrian comfort ‘maps’ for each of our geometries.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03036758.2021.1892776
Divisions: College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > School of Engineering and Technology > Mechanical, Biomedical & Design
College of Engineering & Physical Sciences > Aston Institute of Urban Technology and the Environment (ASTUTE)
Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Purvi P. Pancholy, Kevin Clemens, Patrick Geoghegan, Mark Jermy, Miguel Moyers-Gonzalez & Phillip L. Wilson (2021) Numerical study of flow structure and pedestrian-level wind comfort inside urban street canyons, Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Atmospheric research,atmospheric boundary layers,building aerodynamics,pedestrian comfort,General
Publication ISSN: 1175-8899
Last Modified: 19 Mar 2024 08:25
Date Deposited: 22 Mar 2021 10:10
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.tan ... 58.2021.1892776 (Publisher URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2021-03-11
Published Online Date: 2021-03-11
Accepted Date: 2021-02-16
Authors: Pancholy, Purvi P.
Clemens, Kevin
Geoghegan, Patrick (ORCID Profile 0000-0003-1224-0477)
Jermy, Mark
Moyers-Gonzalez, Miguel
Wilson, Phillip L.

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