Wind Environment Simulation Accuracy in Traditional Villages with Complex Layouts Based on CFD

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Aug 16;18(16):8644. doi: 10.3390/ijerph18168644.

Abstract

Using wind speed, wind direction, and turbulence intensity values as evaluation indicators, the ventilation performance of villages with complex building layouts was studied. We used the SKE, RNG, and RKE solvers in CFD-3D steady-state Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) to simulate the wind environment of a village. The findings show that for the simulation of rural wind environments with complex building layouts, steady-state simulation solvers need to be evaluated in detail to verify their accuracy. In this study, a village with a complex architectural layout in Southern Shaanxi, China, was taken as the research object, and three steady-state simulation solvers were used to evaluate the ventilation performance of the village. The simulated data were compared with the measured data to find the most suitable solver for this kind of village wind environment simulation. The results show that for the simulation of the village wind environment with a complex building layout, the RNG simulation results have the lowest reliability among the three steady-state solvers. The reliability of wind speed distribution and turbulence intensity distribution are 0.7881 and 0.2473, respectively. However, the wind speed and turbulence intensity values obtained by the SKE solver are the closest to the measured values, which are 0.8625 and 0.9088, respectively. Therefore, for villages with complex building layouts, the SKE solver should be the first choice for simulating wind environment distribution. When using the RNG solver, the overall turbulence intensity value obtained is higher than the measured value. The average deviation between the simulated data and SKE and RKE at a height of 1.7 m is 42.61%. The main reason for this is that RNG overestimates the vortices and underestimates the airflow rate in the building intervals.

Keywords: CFD; building environment; rural ventilation; steady-state simulation.

MeSH terms

  • Computer Simulation
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Ventilation
  • Wind*