Passive enhancement of air flow at pedestrian level in built environments

A densely built environment has low wind speed at the pedestrian level due to flow obstruction induced by buildings. Urban street canyons, the outdoor spaces formed between buildings, often have much lower wind speed than the atmospheric wind above the roof level. In tropical regions, wind plays an important role to improve outdoor thermal comfort of urban inhabitants by increasing the convective heat transfer from body surfaces. This thesis explores four types of passive architectural interventions to boost pedestrian-level wind speed in urban street canyons, namely void decks (open ground level), the wind catcher, the reversed wind catcher, and step-up/ step-down canyons. The proposed interventions were first studied experimentally in a recirculating water channel, where an atmospheric flow across an array of two-dimensional canyons was simulated with reduced-scale models of buildings.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Chew, Lup Wai.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Leslie K. Norford.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111767

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/111767