Numerical investigations of flow and passive pollutant exposure in high-rise deep street canyons with various street aspect ratios and viaduct settings

Abstract

Vehicular pollutant exposure of residents and pedestrians in high-rise deep street canyons with viaducts and noise barriers requires special concerns because the ventilation capacity is weak and the literature reported inconsistent findings on flow patterns as aspect ratios (building height/street width, H/W) are larger than 2. By conducting computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations coupled with the intake fraction iF and the daily pollutant exposure E_t, this paper investigates the impact of street aspect ratios, viaducts and noise barriers on the flow and vehicular passive pollutant exposure in full-scale street canyons (H/W=1-6, W=24m). iF represents the fraction of total emissions inhaled by a population (1ppm=10^-6), while E_t means the extent of human beings' contact with pollutants within one day. CFD methodologies of passive pollutant dispersion modeling are successfully validated by wind tunnel data in Meroney et al. (1996). As a novelty, the two-main-vortex pattern start appearing in full-scale street canyons as H/W changes from 4 to 5, however previous studies using wind-tunnel-scale models (H=6cm) reported two to five vortexes as H/W=2-5. This finding is validated by both smoke visualization in scale-model outdoor field experiments (H=1.2m, W=0.6m) and CFD simulations of Reynolds number independence. Cases with two main vortexes (H/W=5-6) experience much larger daily pollutant exposure (~10³-10⁴mg/m³/day) than those with single main vortex as H/W=1-4 (~10¹-10²mg/m³/day). Moreover leeward-side pollutant exposures are much larger than windward-side as H/W=1-4 while oppositely as H/W=5-6. Assuming a general population density, the total iF is 485-803ppm as H/W=1, 2020-12051ppm as H/W=2-4, and 51112-794026ppm as H/W=5-6. With a single elevated pollutant source, cases with viaducts experience significantly smaller pollutant exposures than cases without viaducts. Road barriers slightly increase pollutant exposure in near-road buildings with H/W=1 while reduce a little as H/W=3 and 5. Two-source cases can experience 2.60-5.52 times pollutant exposure as great as single-source cases.

Keywords: Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation; Daily pollutant exposure; Intake fraction; Noise barrier; Street aspect ratio; Viaduct.