Numerical Method to Generate and Evaluate Environmental Wind Over Hills: Comparison of Pedestrian Winds Over Hills and Plains

Abstract

It is well known that the wind profile at altitudes below 10m from mean sea level (MSL) depends on the geometry of terrain, due to the boundary layer phenomenon. Hence, the profile of wind changes for hilly terrains and mountainous regions when compared with the plain regions. This phenomenon has become important to study due to the large-scale urbanisation taking place over hilly regions. The changing wind profile presents a challenge to evaluate the pedestrian winds, as depending on the aspect of the terrain an additional vertical velocity component is experienced due to the upwind climb of the winds. This creates a wind profile that is twisted in form. While wind tunnel studies have attempted to recreate this twisted wind profile (TWP), due to the inherent deficiency of wind tunnels to simultaneously map velocity and flow conditions, a lack of three-dimensional flow profile hinders pedestrian comfort evaluation. In the wind tunnel studies, it was also observed that small vertical eddies and wakes behind the interfering building were not identified which are an important factor to determine the pollution load dispersion. The authors have developed a numerical model to generate the twisted wind profile. The specialty of the numerical model lies in it’s unique boundary conditions that enable the visualization and quantification of the complete 3D wind profile, when the wind over a hilly terrain interacts with urban infrastructures. The developed model was validated with the wind tunnel experiments done previously by Tse and colleagues. The specialty of the model is that it ensures horizontal homogeneity while creating vertical heterogeneity. From the 3D flow profile hence generated the authors were able to deduce that the impact of twisted wind profile depends on the yaw angle of wind interacting with the structure and not on the wind attack angle. Also, the more the twist of the wind, more is the clockwise shifting of the far wakes behind the building. It was also seen that there are more low velocity zones in the pedestrian winds over a hill in comparison to that over the plains. The vertical eddies that aid in convective removal of pollutants were also missing in case of pedestrian winds over hilly terrains, which raises the risk of pollutant accumulation. The same was also observed in Hong-Kong during COVID 19, where due to the twisted nature of wind flow, the virus load increased and natural ventilation was inadequate in the removal of the viral load in the air near urban areas.