A large eddy simulation on the effect of buildings on urban flows

The effect of buildings on flow in urban canopy is one of the most important problems in local/micro-scale meteorology. A large eddy simulation model is used to simulate the flow structure in an urban neighborhood and the bulk effect of the buildings on surrounding flows is analyzed. The results demonstrate that: (a) The inflow conditions affect the detailed flow characteristics much in the building group, including: the distortion or disappearance of the wake vortexes, the change of funneling effect area and the change of location, size of the static-wind area. (b) The bulk effect of the buildings leads to a loss of wind speed in the low layer where height is less than four times of the average building height, and this loss effect changes little when the inflow direction changes. (c) In the bulk effect to environmental fields, the change of inflow direction affects the vertical distribution of turbulence greatly. The peak value of the turbulence energy appears at the height of the average building height. The attribution of fluctuations of different components to turbulence changes greatly at different height levels, in the low levels the horizontal speed fluctuation attribute mostly, while the vertical speed fluctuation does in high levels.