Wind-induced pressure coefficients on buildings dedicated to air change rate assessment with CFD tool in complex urban areas

The paper presents a numerical methodology to assess the natural ventilation. UrbaWind is an automatic computational fluid dynamics code. It was developed to model the wind in urban environments. The turbulence modelling, namely the dependence of turbulence length on the distance from wall, and the model constants were calibrated in order to reproduce with good agreements flow separation around buildings walls and pressure coefficient field on façades. Numerical results match well with the experiments: separation patterns and pressure field on walls in dense urban areas. Examples are presented at the end of the paper in order to show the advantages of the methodology for urban designers as they need pressure coefficients to assess the air change rate of buildings.