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Field synergy analysis of pollutant dispersion in street canyons and its optimization by adding wind catchers

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  • Indoor/Outdoor Airflow and Air Quality
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Abstract

The microenvironment, which involves pollutant dispersion of the urban street canyon, is critical to the health of pedestrians and residents. The objectives of this work are twofold: (i) to effectively assess the pollutant dispersion process based on a theory and (ii) to adopt an appropriate stratigy, i.e., wind catcher, to alleviate the pollution in the street canyons. Pollutant dispersion in street canyons is essentially a convective mass transfer process. Because the convective heat transfer process and the mass transfer process are physically similar and the applicability of field synergy theory to turbulence has been verified in the literature, we apply the field synergy theory to the study of pollutant dispersion in street canyons. In this paper, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation is conducted to investigate the effects of wind catcher, wind speed and the geometry of the street canyons on pollutant dispersion. According to the field synergy theory, Sherwood number and field synergy number are used to quantitatively evaluate the wind catcher and wind speed on the diffusion of pollutants in asymmetric street canyons. The results show that adding wind catchers can significantly improve the air quality of the step-down street canyon and reduce the average pollutant concentrations in the street canyon by 75%. Higher wind speed enhances diffusion of pollutants differently in different geometric street canyons.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51778511), the European Commission H2020 Marie S Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) award (Grant No. 871998), Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 2018CFA029), Key Project of ESI Discipline Development of Wuhan University of Technology (Grant No. 2017001), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2019IVB082). The authors of this article would like to express their sincere thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, for providing insightful comments and constructive advice that substantially improved the technicality of this article.

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Correspondence to Yongjia Wu.

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Ming, T., Han, H., Zhao, Z. et al. Field synergy analysis of pollutant dispersion in street canyons and its optimization by adding wind catchers. Build. Simul. 14, 391–405 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-020-0720-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-020-0720-4

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