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Pedestrian wind comfort is imperative for a smooth and functional urban environment. It is necessary for dense cities where tall buildings and narrow streets cause vortices, vortex shedding, and wind tunnels. These often lead to pedestrians’ discomfort and safety issues.
Wind analysis can be an invaluable way to tackle these problems. It can simulate and visualize how air flows around buildings and structures under different conditions. Subsequently, it predicts wind behaviors and their effect on the environment.
In this article, we will understand what pedestrian wind comfort is and explore how CFD wind analysis can help to improve this.
In built environments like big cities with numerous buildings and skyscrapers, pedestrians experience abnormal and unexpected wind conditions daily that affect their comfort and safety.
These abnormal wind conditions are caused by surrounding buildings, structures, and narrow streets when air collides with them and enters an immediate narrow space. It results in vortices, acceleration of velocity, gusts, etc.,
But today, with advanced simulation technology, built environments can be simulated and visualized to understand how air behaves around them and can affect people, especially pedestrians, and cyclists. Subsequently, the design would be rectified so that air has minimum influence on the comforts and safety of people.
The domain that deals with the issues of comfort and discomfort experienced by people due to wind conditions in the built environment is called pedestrian wind comfort.
CFD is a powerful tool to simulate air and predict its behavior and effects on the urban environment using complex mathematical models and computer programs.
CFD simulation of an environment can identify areas of high velocity and turbulence that may cause discomfort and pose a risk to pedestrians. It also helps to understand how air interacts with the surrounding structure. Thus, it allows people to decide about building layouts, orientation, and other factors affecting pedestrian wind comfort.
One of the most important parameters used in wind analysis is wind comfort level, which is based on the Beufort Scale. The wind comfort level measures the wind conditions that pedestrians experience in a particular area.
It provides informative information for designing urban spaces that will be comfortable and safe for pedestrians.
Now let’s look at the basic process of wind analysis for pedestrians’ wind comfort using CFD simulation.
This should be the very first step of wind analysis, and it should involve specifying the objective of the analysis and selecting the environment. In this step, sope and focus should be determined. For example:
Suppose the analysis’s objective is to examine the impact of wind on pedestrian comfort. In that case, the analysis should prioritize identifying areas where wind velocity is high and may cause discomfort and pose risks.
If the objective is to find areas of high wind velocity and turbulence, the analysis should focus on creating a map of air behavior around a particular built environment.
In case the objective is to inspect different design options for improving pedestrian wind comfort, the simulation should focus on testing different building structures and landscaping that may influence wind conditions.
After defining the objective and focus of analysis, the next step should be collecting data on the environment to build a 3D model and set up the simulation.
Data collection should involve collecting information about the built environment, such as geographical information, building information, meteorological data, pedestrian data, wind tunnel data, and other environmental data.
Geographical data should include information about sites, and geographic locations, such as latitude and longitude, topography, terrain, etc.
Building information should consider relevant data such as heights, orientations, setbacks, etc. This information can be acquired through surveys and building layouts.
Meteorological data include information about wind, such as temperature, speed, direction, and humidity. This information can be acquired from a weather database.
Pedestrian data involves information about the number of pedestrians in the area, their average heights and walking speed, etc.
Wind tunnel data should include information about wind behavior around specific buildings and the structures in the built environment.
Other environmental data should have information about urban environments, such as water bodies, trees, and other natural or man-made structures that may influence wind conditions.
In this step, a 3D model of the built environment should be created, including all the buildings, structures, and other features using computer-aided design ( CAD). Consequently, the 3D model should be imported into CFD to generate a mesh.
The computational domain is a particular space around the simulated built environment. It is defined by specifying the size and shape of the domain and boundary conditions.
In this step, simulation should be set up in a CFD simulation program. The solver algorithm and turbulence model should be selected for simulation parameters. These parameters are crucial for the speed of simulation.
Once the simulation is ready, it should be carried out on a high-performance computer, and the results should be ready to achieve, which will be analyzed in post-processing.
This step should analyze the result using visualization computer programs like ParaView and Tacplot. Now results can be used to assess the impact of wind on pedestrian comfort, figure out areas of high wind velocity, turbulence, etc., and evaluate different design considerations to improve pedestrians’ wind comfort.
CFD wind analysis can be crucial to analyze the behavior of wind around the urban environment to predict wind conditions for pedestrian wind comfort and to improve the design of built environments focusing on the comfort and safety of pedestrians.
CFD is a powerful tool. Therefore, performing the simulation requires exceptional expertise and experience for reliable predictions and results.
We at Mechartes provide FEA and CFD simulation services for core industries such as oil, gas, power, buildings, constructions, etc., including wind analysis for pedestrian wind comfort.
With our skilled engineers and CFD experts, we have been able to provide exceptional results for numerous clients around the world.
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