A cloud-based platform to predict wind pressure coefficients on buildings

Natural ventilation (NV) is a key passive strategy to design energy-efficient buildings and improve indoor air quality. Therefore, accurate modeling of the NV effects is a basic requirement to include this technique during the building design process. However, there is an important lack of wind pressure coefficients (C ) data, essential input parameters for NV models. Besides this, there are no simple but still reliable tools to predict C data on buildings with arbitrary shapes and surrounding conditions, which means a significant limitation to NV modeling in real applications. For this reason, the present contribution proposes a novel cloud-based platform to predict wind pressure coefficients on buildings. The platform comprises a set of tools for performing fully unattended computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of the atmospheric boundary layer and getting reliable C data for actual scenarios. CFD-expert decisions throughout the entire workflow are implemented to automatize the generation of the computational domain, the meshing procedure, the solution stage, and the post-processing of the results. To evaluate the performance of the platform, an exhaustive validation against wind tunnel experimental data is carried out for a wide range of case studies. These include buildings with openings, balconies, irregular floor-plans, and surrounding urban environments. The C results are in close agreement with experimental data, reducing 60%-77% the prediction error on the openings regarding the EnergyPlus software. The platform introduced shows being a reliable and practical C data source for NV modeling in real building design scenarios.

The appendix is available in the online version of this article at 10.1007/s12273-021-0881-9.