Wind Environment Simulation Accuracy in Traditional Villages with Complex Layouts Based on CFD

Area of Science:

• Environmental Engineering
• Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
• Urban Meteorology

Background:

• Assessing village ventilation is crucial for sustainable rural development and resident comfort.
• Complex building layouts in villages pose challenges for accurate wind environment simulations.
• Traditional simulation methods may not adequately capture the nuances of rural wind dynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate and compare the accuracy of three steady-state computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers (SKE, RNG, RKE) for simulating village ventilation.
• To determine the most reliable solver for assessing wind speed, direction, and turbulence intensity in complex rural architectural layouts.
• To provide guidance on selecting appropriate simulation tools for optimizing village wind environments.

Main Methods:

• Utilized CFD-3D steady-state Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations.
• Employed SKE, RNG, and RKE solvers to model the wind environment of a village in Southern Shaanxi, China.
• Compared simulation results with measured data to validate solver performance and reliability.

Main Results:

• The RNG solver demonstrated the lowest reliability for simulating wind speed (0.7881) and turbulence intensity (0.2473).
• The SKE solver yielded results closest to measured data for wind speed (0.8625) and turbulence intensity (0.9088).
• RNG solver tended to overestimate turbulence intensity and underestimate airflow rates, showing an average deviation of 42.61% with SKE and RKE at 1.7m.

Conclusions:

• The SKE solver is recommended as the primary choice for simulating wind environment distribution in villages with complex building layouts.
• Steady-state simulation solvers require thorough evaluation and validation against measured data for complex rural environments.
• Accurate wind environment simulation is essential for effective ventilation assessment and sustainable rural planning.