Modeling of urban wind for infiltration studies

Wind plays a significant role in the amount of infiltration experienced by a building, and can be strongly impacted by the buildings' surroundings. Urban environments in particular create challenging flow regimes, which often contain complex vortices and canyon flows. The goal of this study was to characterize the sheltering effects of urban environments based on the parameters currently used to model urban flows. The effects of shelter are determined with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of a university campus in the presence and absence of neighboring structures. Overall, when studying urban wind flows, a baseline wind study should be performed on the zone of interest, using a boundary wind profile based on average properties of the city. When considering sheltering effects, the sheltering zone should be as wide as the zone of interest and extend at least eight building heights upwind from the edge of the zone of interest.