The impact of building surface temperature rise on airflow and cross-contamination around high-rise building

Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2020 Apr;27(11):11855-11869. doi: 10.1007/s11356-020-07671-1. Epub 2020 Jan 24.

Abstract

This paper numerically studies the characteristics of flow field around a high-rise building and the cross-contamination when the building surface is heated by the solar radiation. Firstly, the normalized concentration Kc is used to evaluate the dispersion characteristics under different source locations without surface temperature rise. Under iso-thermal condition, the near-wall pollutant dispersion features revealed by the predicted results are similar to our previous wind tunnel experiment. Then, the effect of wall surface temperature rise on the cross-contamination and the flow fields is evaluated based on the near-wall concentration distributions and the wake zone vortex core positions, respectively. When the building surface temperature rises, the location of vortex core obviously changes comparing with that under iso-thermal condition. The correction formula for the vortex core location with the leeward wall surface temperature rise below 15 K is developed. The windward wall surface temperature rise brings more serious pollutant accumulation. The near-wall concentrations increase with the rise of temperature when the pollutant is released from the bottom and middle of leeward wall surface, while the top-release scenario exhibited a contrary tendency. For the three interval ranges of generally recognized Richardson number Ri (Ri < 0.1; 0.1 < Ri < 10; Ri > 10), these results indicate that when Ri is less than 0.1, the effect of wall surface temperature rise on near-wall flow and cross-contamination of small-scale model cannot be ignored.

Keywords: Concentration; High-rise building; Pollutant; Temperature; Vortex core.

MeSH terms

  • Air Pollutants / analysis*
  • Hot Temperature
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Temperature

Substances

  • Air Pollutants