CFD analysis of flow across adjacent buildings with concave roof structure using large-eddy simulation (LES)

• Main Author: Foo, Tze Jie
• Other Authors: Martin Skote
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/70756
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Currently, there is a growing trend towards green building, where buildings are designed to cater for the collection of rainwater for rooftop gardening. A method to achieve this is through the functional design of a concave roof structure that can act as a ‘bowl’ to collect the rainwater. On top of this application, the concave roof structure also provides a method of trapping onto the water instead of letting the rainwater flow down the roof, which can help reduce the chances of flash floods during heavy monsoon seasons. However, the collection of rainwater to impose certain loading onto the building and thus there is a need to perform a CFD analysis into the behaviour of the moving fluid flowing across the concave roof building. Previous studies have been conducted to validate the boundary conditions as well as study effects of velocity, sag depth and other parameters and compare with literature review from past research on concave roof structure of a single building. The current study will build on the previous study by studying the effects and flow behaviour on two concave roof structures, adjacent to each other and observe any trend in the drag, lift and moment coefficients, which will create additional wind loads onto the structure of the building. The velocity of the fluid flow across the adjacent concave roof buildings will be studied to understand the flow behaviour of the buildings. The software to be used is an open source CFD program called OpenFoam, which exposes the user to Linux kind of programming environment. Post processing will be done on ParaView, which is a universal viewer software that can display post processing results from multiple formats.