Abstract
Airflow pattern through street canyons has been widely studied to understand the nature of pollution dispersion in order to develop guidelines for urban planners. One of the major contributing parameters in pollution dispersion is thermal-induced flow caused by surface and air temperature difference. However, most of the previous studies assumed isothermal condition for street canyons. Those addressed the thermal-induced flow, have assumed a uniform wall surface temperature distribution. The external building wall surface temperature distribution is not uniform, and is influenced by many factors including the wall surface characteristics, and shading. The non-uniform temperature distribution significantly impacts on 3-dimensional airflow within street canyons. Moreover, effect of intersection is barely considered in the literature where L/H<3 (L and H are respectively length and height of street canyon). This Paper reports the development of a 3-dimensional model to study the effect of non-uniform wall surface temperature distribution on the pollution dispersion and flow pattern within the short street canyons (L/H<3). For this purpose, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is developed to investigate these effects on pollution dispersion in various prevailing wind velocities and directions. Moreover, active and passive techniques to reduce the level of concentration are examined. The study clearly shows that thermal-induced flow dominates during fair-weather condition.
