Air ventilation impacts of the “wall effect” resulting from the alignment of high-rise buildings

The objective of this study is to investigate the air ventilation impacts of the so called “wall effect” caused by the alignment of high-rise buildings in complex building clusters. The research method employs the numerical algorithm of computational fluid dynamics (CFD – FLUENT) to simulate the steady-state wind field in a typical Hong Kong urban setting and investigate pollutant dispersion inside the street canyon utilizing a pollutant transport model. The model settings of validation study were accomplished by comparing the simulation wind field around a single building block to wind tunnel data. The results revealed that our model simulation is fairly close to the wind tunnel measurements. In this paper, a typical dense building distribution in Hong Kong with 2 incident wind directions (0° and 22.5°) is studied. Two performance indicators are used to quantify the air ventilation impacts, namely the velocity ratio (VR) and the retention time (T_r) of pollutants at the street level. The results indicated that the velocity ratio at 2 m above ground was reduced 40% and retention time of pollutants increased 80% inside the street canyon when high-rise buildings with 4 times height of the street canyon were aligned as a “wall” upstream. While this reduction of air ventilation was anticipated, the magnitude is significant and this result clearly has important implications for building and urban planning.