Title: The effect of building layout patterns on the formation of heat islands: a computational study

Authors: K. Veena; K.M. Parammasivam; T.N. Venkatesh

Addresses: Department of Aerospace Engineering, Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University, Chennai – 600044, Tamil Nadu, India ' Department of Aerospace Engineering, Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University, Chennai – 600044, Tamil Nadu, India ' CTFD Division, CSIR-National Aerospace Laboratories, Bengaluru – 560017, Karnataka, India

Abstract: Numerical methods are getting high acceptance worldwide for studying heat islands. As most of the existing studies have not investigated the importance of spacing between buildings, the main goal of the current study is to compare the behaviour of wind patterns and heat island formation in building clusters with less spacing and adequate spacing according to National Building Codes of India (NBC 2016). Six building layouts with a combination of high-rise and low-rise buildings are numerically studied using buoyant-Boussinesq solvers. Results show that the near-surface air temperature is higher for less spacing cases than adequate spacing cases. An air temperature higher than the threshold value (ΔT = 0.7 K) was identified at 55% of the area near the ground for less spacing sub-case. In comparison with less spacing cases, the wind velocity near the building cluster was increased by 17.7%, and the temperature spread decreased by 35.04% by following the NBC.

Keywords: urban heat island; National Building Codes; computational fluid dynamics; near-surface air temperature; thermal comfort; wind environment; temperature distribution.

DOI: 10.1504/PCFD.2024.138191

Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics, An International Journal, 2024 Vol.24 No.3, pp.143 - 161

Received: 29 Nov 2021
Received in revised form: 24 Dec 2022
Accepted: 20 Feb 2023
Published online: 30 Apr 2024 *

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