Influencing Factors on Airflow and Pollutant Dispersion around Buildings under the Combined Effect of Wind and Buoyancy—A Review

Mei Wu, Guangwei Zhang, Liping Wang, Xiaoping Liu () and Zhengwei Wu ()
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Mei Wu: School of Civil Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China
Guangwei Zhang: School of Civil Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China
Liping Wang: School of Civil Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China
Xiaoping Liu: School of Civil Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei 230009, China
Zhengwei Wu: School of Nuclear Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 19, 1-19

Abstract: With the rapid growth of populations worldwide, air quality has become an increasingly important issue related to the health and safety of city inhabitants. There are quite a few factors that contribute to urban air pollution; the majority of studies examining the issue are concerned with environmental conditions, building geometries, source characteristics and other factors and have used a variety of approaches, from theoretical modelling to experimental measurements and numerical simulations. Among the environmental conditions, solar-radiation-induced buoyancy plays an important role in realistic conditions. The thermal conditions of the ground and building façades directly affect the wind field and pollutant dispersion patterns in the microclimate. The coupling effect of wind and buoyancy on the urban environment are currently hot and attractive research topics. Extensive studies have been devoted to this field, some focused on the street canyon scale, and have found that thermal effects do not significantly affect the main airflow structure in the interior of the street canyon but strongly affect the wind velocity and pollutant concentration at the pedestrian level. Others revealed that the pollutant dispersion routes can be obviously different under various Richardson numbers at the scale of the isolated building. The purpose of this review is therefore to systematically articulate the approaches and research outcomes under the combined effect of wind and buoyancy from the street canyon scale to an isolated building, which should provide some insights into future modelling directions in environmental studies.

Keywords: wind tunnel measurements; computational fluid dynamics; thermal buoyancy; combined effect; pollutant dispersion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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