Adequate provision of natural ventilation in tropical areas is regarded as one of the design criteria for assessing 'green' or 'sustainable' building. Driving forces for natural ventilation in those areas are basically wind-induced action, not stack effect nor buoyancy of warm air columns. Wind-induced air movement is a transient phenomenon depends not only on the wind speeds measured in some designated sites, but strongly affected by the surrounding environment. This is particularly obvious in a dense urban area where buildings are closely built together. For a building located adjacent to a taller building, turbulent effects due to incident wind fields would be important. Note that windows or even refuge floors might be opened at some levels, giving flow paths to change the entire patterns of air flow and pressure distribution. In this paper, the wind-induced indoor airflow in a building adjacent to a vertical wall is studied by Computational Fluid Dynamics. A CFD software based on large-eddy simulations is selected. Different scenarios on building height, openings and distances away from the vertical wall will be simulated. Incident airflows of a parabolic boundary layer and a top-hat flow pattern are considered. The separate flow at the sharp corner would be different for these two incident airflow profiles. Results are useful not only for providing better ventilation design, but also for working out fire safety management in case of accidents. Note that smoke, or even flame, will spread by following the wind-induced air motion.
Keywords. wind environment; CFD; vertical wall
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How to cite this article
Chow, W. (2003). 'Wind environment for a high-rise building adjacent to a vertical wall'. SET Proceedings, 2(1), pp. 19-25. https://doi.org/10.65582/set.2003.004
