A CFD assessment of the thermal conditions in a ventilated football stadium designed for a hot and humid climate environment

Hosting big sports events, as the Olympics and the Football World Cup, has been adopted by emerging countries as a political practice to demonstrate soft power capabilities and as a strategy to enhance them. The structures chosen to host these events often need major upgrades and, sometimes, they are built from scratch to integrate the systems to ensure the required comfort to the athletes, the audience, and the press. Qatar, which is hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, is an interesting case study because of its humid and hot weather that made necessary the use of an air conditioning system for the bleachers and the pitch of the stadiums and other measures to reduce the solar heating and the hot winds action. The aim of this work is to investigate, by a CFD study, the several scenarios that can arise in such an environment, considering an artificially cooled stadium with a generic architecture. A steady state, multi region conjugate heat transfer solver will be employed to study the wind impact on the thermal conditions inside and outside the structure. Different wind speeds and temperatures are considered ranging from the very typical Qatar's conditions to more extreme ones. In addition, the impact of air humidity is explored. The simulations outputs will be used to evaluate the thermal comfort in each stadium sector; the PMV-PPD model will be used for this purpose. Moreover, the calculated temperatures and humidity will be reported in the Givoni diagram to show if the thermal comfort of the building lie in the comfort zone.