Recent Advances in Computational Wind Engineering
Eng. Mattia Ricci
ENEA
December 20th 2019
14:00
room LAMC (viale Risorgimento 2, Bologna)
Abstract: Due to the growing urbanization rate, the disciplines of Urban Physics and Wind Engineering are rapidly gaining interest from the scientific community. In particular, the study of wind flows in the urban environment has become an extremely active research topic in the last decades, due to its key role in the design of safer and more sustainable cities. In the field of Wind Engineering, research is traditionally based on experimental campaigns conducted either on site or in wind tunnels facilities using reduced-scale geometrical models. Nevertheless, in the last decades thanks to the growth in the available computer power, numerical techniques based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) have become a very attractive tool to deal with wind flows in the urban environment. Indeed, CFD simulations allow to deal with a wide range of problems, such as wind loads on structures, indoor and outdoor wind comfort, pollutant dispersion, without the need for designing expensive experimental campaigns. Although numerical techniques show several advantages when compared to the traditional experimental approach based on wind tunnel testing, CFD results often show to be very sensitive to the numerical setups adopted even when simple geometries are considered and an extensive research work is still necessary in order to accurately assess CFD results accuracy and reliability. The lecture will show recent advances in the field of Computational Wind Engineering. In particular, starting from benchmarks focused on bluff bodies aerodynamics, some examples of wind loads on buildings will be analyzed. Finally, an application of CFD to the prediction of pollutant dispersion in the urban environment will be discussed.