Project title:

Study of urban microclimate and its influence on the natural ventilation potential of buildings

Project description:

With the rapid urbanization, the portion of the population living in urban areas has continuously increased. Due to the high building density, the microclimate (wind environment, thermal environment and pollutant) in urban areas is getting worse compared to rural areas. The air temperature is higher due to the urban heat island (UHI) effect and the wind speed is lower due to wind sheltering.

The urban microclimate not only influences the outdoor pedestrian-level wind comfort, thermal comfort and pollutant dispersion, but also has a large impact on the indoor air quality and building energy demand and natural ventilation of buildings.

This Ph.D project aims to investigate the urban microclimate (wind environment and thermal environment) and its impacts on the natural ventilation performance of the urban buildings. The research work involves Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations, Building energy simulations (BES) and experiments in the boundary layer wind-tunnel. The major activities include investigation of the urban ventilation & wind environment in city scale (Aarhus, Denmark and Guangzhou, China), airflow around buildings in neighborhood scale, natural ventilation potential of buildings under specify microclimate condition.

Supervisors: Guoqiang Zhang and Li Rong