Simulating Turbulent Air Flows In Central London And Studying Effect Of Tall Buildings

We present work associated with the implementation of a validated street-canyon/neighbourhood model that can help assess the air quality within existing building and neighbourhood designs and suggest modifications & improvements in order to produce sustainable, safer, healthier, and more comfortable urban environments. The work was motivated by both the increasing number of tall buildings in central London (“skyscrapers”) and also the recent plans of placing combined heat and power plants (CHPs) within the urban environment. The Large Eddy Simulation (LES) work was initiated after a series of wind tunnel experiments were carried out at the Enflo wind tunnel (University of Surrey) in order to assess the effect of emissions from Combined and Heat Power plants (CHPs) on top of one of the buildings. A series of scenarios were tested in the wind tunnel and mean concentrations and their fluctuations were measured. The LES models were set-up representing the wind tunnel geometries as well as wind conditions. The novel LES methodology implemented uses an unstructured, adaptive mesh and an anisotropic eddy viscosity tensor for the subgrid scales (based on the anisotropic mesh). The comparisons of the complex turbulent air flows and concentrations between model results and wind tunnel data show a good correlation – less than 20% error between predictions and measured data. We also looked at the effect of tall buildings on the surrounding complex air flows and dispersion of pollutants, using as prime examples the “Walkie-Talkie” building and the Shard skyscraper in central London, UK. Interesting simulation air flow results and dispersion for the “Walkie-Talkie” building are presented. Key words: air pollution, urban environment, wind tunnel experiments.