Pedestrian level turbulent wind flow around an elevated building

Abstract

Wind flow turbulence plays a critical role in the pedestrian level wind environment, particularly for the airflow around buildings with specific architectural features. The elevated design, a feature was proved to improve the pedestrian level weak wind conditions in high-density cities in our earlier study. This present study aims to further investigate the pedestrian level wind flow turbulence in an elevated building surrounding. The predictions were conducted by comparing the CFD simulation and a wind tunnel experiment. Specifically, the Detached Eddy Simulation (DES), the Steady-state and the Unsteady-state RANS (SRANS and URANS), were assessed. The effects of mesh resolutions and inflow fluctuating algorithms on the performance of the DES model were thoroughly evaluated. DES can better reproduce the mean flow fields than the other two models. The unsteady flow fluctuations around the elevated building are analyzed with energy spectral density. Meanwhile, the periodical wind flow fields around the elevated building are accurately obtained.