CFD modelling and PIV experimental validation of flow fields in urban environments

The problem of flow field in the urban boundary-layer (UBL) in aspects of wind comfort around buildings and pollutant dispersion has grown in importance since human activity has become so intense that it started to have considerable impact on environment. The issue of wind comfort in urban areas is the result of complex interactions of many flow phenomena and for a long time it arouses a great interest of the research centres. The aim of article is to study urban atmospheric flow at the local scale, which allows for both a detailed reproduction of the flow phenomena and the development of wind comfort criteria. The proposed methodology involves the use of PIV wind tunnel experiments as well as numerical simulations (Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD) in order to enhance understanding of the flow phenomena at this particular scale in urban environments. The analysis has been performed for the 3D case of two surface-mounted buildings arranged in tandem, which were placed with one face normal to the oncoming flow. The local characteristics of flow were obtained by the use of commercial CFD code (ANSYS Fluent). The validation was carried out with reference to the PIV results.