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On flows in simulated urban canopies

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Abstract

Flow and turbulence within building canopies continue to be a topic of profound interest in the context of pedestrian comfort, wind loading, contaminant dispersion and energy usage in populated urban areas. Many experimental studies have been reported on this topic, but they either deal with wind/water tunnel measurements (at low Reynolds numbers) or complex urban building clusters (where the results are site dependent and difficult to interpret). To avert such problems, an instrumented mock building cluster made of a regular array of man-sized objects (shipping containers) placed in the atmospheric boundary layer was used to investigate spatial flow adjustment, flow patterns (as a function of approach angle) and turbulence within the building canopy. A new scaling is proposed for the characteristic canopy velocity based on the approach flow and canopy morphology, which was found to perform well when evaluated against experimental data. The flow adjustment at the leading and trailing edges of the canopy was found to be in good agreement with the formulation of Belcher et al. (J Fluid Mech 488:369–398, 2003). The results have applications to developing simple and fast contaminant transport and dispersion models that can be used in conjunction with emergency response.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to Mr. Christopher Biltoft, Dr. Marko Princevac and Dr. Matthew A. Nelson for their help during field measurements and data processing. This research was supported by the NSF (CMG; Grant # 0934592) and ARO (Geosciences). The work was carried out when the first two authors were at the Center for Environmental Fluid Dynamics at Arizona State University, the support of which is gratefully acknowledged. The authors are very thankful to anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions and comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Meteorology Division, West Desert Test Center, Dugway Proving Ground, Dugway, UT , 84022, USA

    Dragan Zajic

  2. Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratories, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN , 46556, USA

    Harindra J. S. Fernando

  3. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM , 87545, USA

    Michael J. Brown

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT , 84112, USA

    Eric R. Pardyjak

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  1. Dragan Zajic
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  4. Eric R. Pardyjak
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Correspondence to Dragan Zajic.

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Zajic, D., Fernando, H.J.S., Brown, M.J. et al. On flows in simulated urban canopies. Environ Fluid Mech 15, 275–303 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10652-013-9311-6

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