Hi i am a PhD student at Northumbria University researching the use of computer software in the urban design process. As part of my research i am wishing to analyse and model the wind environment within an urban setting. I plan to design a group of city centre squares for Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and would like to model and analyse the wind environment at street level. I haven't been able to find at particular software applications that purely deals with wind modelling, so believe CFD software will offer me the best opportunity to fulfil my research needs. I was hoping you could tell me, if you believe CFD software can fulfil my request to model the urban wind movement at street level? If so, could you advice on what product you feel will be the best to use? If you are aware of the use of CFD software in this matter, to model wind movement, i would be grateful if you send any further information you have.

Thank you for your time

James Charlton

why not? With the CFD softwares generally you simulate any kind of fluid, in any condition. In your case your fluid will be the air, and the conditions will be the city buildings. So I think any CFD software can give you the solution to your problem, but since you are writing in the flow-3d forum and since I'm flow-3d users... I suggest you to use flow-3d over all!

[Faraday]

James,
The software UrbaWind (http://www.meteodyn.com/en/software/urbawind.html) is a CFD tool dedicated to wind modelling. The buildings and vegetation are modelled with CAD files (.STL file format) and the roughness (asphalt, water or grass) can also be taken into account. The mesh is cartesian with an automatic refinement around the interest areas. It solves the U-RANS equations with a 1-eq turbulence model (k-L).
For your particular application, there is a specific module to compute mean wind speed and levels of pedestrian comfort based on the local climatology.

Hope it can help.

Best,
Faraday