Cavitation

Flow visualisation of a cavitating hydrofoil as part of a preliminary test validation study for a large numerical and physical research project.

Wind Simulations of The Urban Canyon Effect

Overview

Pacific ESI has the skills to work to work with your CAD designs to estimate the wind effects not only on your building but the effect of the placement in relation to the surrounding buildings. This is particularly valuable in two situations:

  1. dense urban environments: where the local canyon effects can dramatically affect pedestrian and vehicle safety at ground level.
  2. unusual architectural forms: when moving beyond traditional design shapes that are covered by design manuals, a CFD wind load analysis can improve the structural design

The image below is from a test case against validation data from Shinjuku, Japan of wind around skyscrapers. Stream tubes, coloured by velocity magnitude, are used to visualise the flow, while the solid bodies are coloured by the local surface pressure.

Urban canyon wind visualised with stream tubes and surface pressures.

Searchable Keywords

  1. Computational Fluid Dynamics
  2. OpenFOAM
  3. CFD-ACE+
  4. Atmospheric Boundary Layers
  5. Urban Canyon
  6. Wind
  7. Wind Engineering
  8. Pressure Loads
  9. Architectural Wind Design
  10. Incompressible flow