International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Natural ventilation is a well-known method to improve indoor air quality. Most studies did not consider the elements on building envelopes. This paper tries to investigate the horizontal elements’ effect on one-sided ventilation of the windward rooms along a street canyon and study the dispersion of pollutant by using a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model. Firstly, a three-dimensional numerical model for simulating flow and pollutant dispersion was developed by using the coded OpenFOAM and then validated against the water channel and the wind tunnel results. After the validation, four different widths of horizontal elements are applied to this present study, as well as a compared case, which is of no element (W_e=0). Dimensionless pollutant concentration ̅c and ventilation rates (ACH) are analyzed. The numerical results reveal that the percentage decrease of average ventilation rate of buildings reaches 94.7% when the width of the horizontal elements (W_e) is increased from 0.2m to 1.5m. Besides, the pollutant concentration is reduced by adding the horizontal elements, though, the value of We do not influence the air flow. Elements on building envelope provides a possibility to improve the quality of building environment. This study intends to learn more about the effects of the horizontal elements on ventilation and pollutant dispersion and thus may contribute to city and building designs.

Index Terms—CFD simulation, OpenFOAM, ACH, pollutant concentration

The authors are with School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China (e-mail: cathaygrace@hust.edu.cn, Chhwh@hust.edu.cn).

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Cite: Yuya Xiong and Hong Chen, "Effects of the Horizontal Elements on Windward Wall of Buildings on Natural Ventilation and Pollutant Dispersion," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 424-429, 2019.

Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).