A Novel Canopy Drag Coefficient Model for Analyzing Urban Wind Environments Based on the Large Eddy Simulation

Lian Shen, Yan Han, Guoji Xu, Chunsheng Cai, Ying Yang and Xugang Hua
Additional contact information
Lian Shen: School of Civil Engineering, Changsha University, Changsha 410003, China
Yan Han: School of Civil Engineering, Changsha University of Science & Technology, Changsha 410004, China
Guoji Xu: School of Civil Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China
Chunsheng Cai: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70801, USA
Ying Yang: Hunan Architectural Design Institute Limited Company, Changsha 410100, China
Xugang Hua: School of Civil Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: It is very challenging to capture the drag effects for the computational fluid dynamics numerical simulations of the urban canopy wind environment. This study proposed a novel canopy drag coefficient model for accurate analysis of the urban wind environment based on a large eddy simulation, where the drag coefficients varied with quantitatively identified canopy parameters along with the height. Four computational parameters, namely the average kinetic energy, turbulent kinetic energy, sub-grid scale turbulent kinetic energy, and sub-grid scale dissipation, were incorporated into the conventional drag coefficient. The Meixi Lake International Community in Changsha, China, was considered as a case study. The inlet boundary conditions were provided by the Weather Research and Forecasting model, and the proposed drag coefficient model was utilized to simulate the wind field characteristics. The results showed that the drag coefficient was relatively large near the ground, and it decreased with the increase of height overall. The decay rate of the drag coefficient below 0.4 times the building was significantly higher than the other areas. Finally, compared with the field measurement data, the proposed model had good accuracy of the simulated wind field compared to previous approaches, thus offering a reliable model for analyzing the urban wind environment.

Keywords: urban canopy; LES; drag coefficient; wind environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/4/796/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/4/796/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:14:y:2021:i:4:p:796-:d:492281

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().