Impacts of coexisting buildings and trees on the performance of rooftop wind turbines: An idealized numerical study

Xiantao Fan, Mingwei Ge, Wei Tan and Qi Li

Renewable Energy, 2021, vol. 177, issue C, 164-180

Abstract: In response to the rapid growth of energy consumption in urban cities, rooftop wind turbines (RWT) have emerged as a powerful technique for providing sustainable energy and strategically minimizing the carbon footprint of buildings. However, significant knowledge gaps exist regarding how RWT respond to the complex urban environmental flows modified by the coexisting buildings and trees. This study conducts idealized numerical experiments using an open-source large-eddy simulation model to investigate the interactions between actuator-disc turbines, street trees and buildings. We found that trees taller than the mean building height modifies the existing roof-level strong shear layer by extracting energy from the mean momentum. A significant change in the mean kinetic energy budget is induced, drastically increasing turbulence production of the flow, which leads to lower power output of RWT. Trees lower than the buildings hardly alter the mean flow field but they reduce turbulence production near the roof level. As a result, improved power output (16%) and decreased normalized power fluctuation (5.2%) are observed compared to the control case without trees. The results highlight that it is important to assess effects of different street tree morphologies on the performance of RWT in their design and implementation processes.

Keywords: Rooftop wind turbines; Street trees; Large eddy simulation; Urban environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148121007722
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:177:y:2021:i:c:p:164-180

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2021.05.090

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().