Developing a model for Urban Environment based on transient RANS approach

The ambient air temperature in a city is a critical parameter for thermal comfort. It also strongly influences energy needs for cooling and heating. As such, it is necessary to work on solutions to limit the effects of urban heat islands. Building and street surfaces cover a big fraction of the city surfaces. Thermal and radiative parameters of these surfaces can affect urban ambient air temperature and street canyon temperature. So, using specially designed pavements on buildings and surfaces on the streets can be an effective way to mitigate the urban heating. In this study, using fluid flow and heat transfer simulations, the thermal effect of cool pavements and street surfaces on the urban environment is studied. Finite Volume solver in ANSYS/FLUENT 22. software is used to solve unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (URANS) equations. Realistic solar load is applied using solar ray tracing model to simulate the radiation of the sun. The aim of this paper is to describe the developed model and to show the accuracy of the result by comparing them to real data that have been published from data gathering campaigns. Also, results are compared with other models to measure the accuracy of this model against others.

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