Wind quantification in urban environments

There is today a real lack of scientific studies and simple design tools to understand wind flows around buildings. This research is based on a great number of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulations carried out with FLUENT software to evaluate wind comfort at pedestrian level. This paper describes first the wind comfort criteria chosen. It then develops the process used for validating FLUENT software for wind studies in dense urban environments by comparing our simulations results with wind tunnel tests. This validation shows that wind mean velocities around buildings can be simulated numerically with a very
high degree of accuracy. Based on the results of our simulations, we developed simple graphical tools to quantify critical wind speeds around buildings. This article should thus help in practice architects and town planners to design our built environment. Moreover, this paper shows how numerical modelling is now a high-performance tool to work out useful guidelines and simple design tools for urban planners.