A Study on the Effects of Wind Fence on the Dispersion of the Particles Emitted from the Construction Site Using GIS and a CFD Model

In this study, the effects of wind fences on the dispersion of the particles emitted from a constructing site located in the building-congested area in Busan, Korea, using geographic information system (GIS) and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. We averaged the wind speeds observed for 10 years at the Busan automated synoptic observing system (ASOS) and we used the averaged wind speed as the wind speed at the reference height (10 m above the ground level). The numerical simulations were performed for 16 inflow directions, before and after the construction of wind fences with the heights of 5 m and 10 m (total 48 simulations). The detailed flows were analyzed for the northeasterly and south-southwesterly cases which predominantly observed at the Busan ASOS. In the northeasterly case, high concentration appeared at the elementary school next to the construction site due to transport by the airflow coming from the northeast. In the 5-m wind fence case, the wind speeds were slightly weaker and the spread of the fugitive dust was slightly less than those in the no wind fence case. In the 10-m wind fence case, the dust concentration at the elementary school has the maximum reduction of 37%. In the south-southwesterly case, the flow pattern became complicated in the construction site due to the terrain and buildings. Fugitive dust was stagnant at the south side of the construction site but rather spread to the north, increasing the concentration at the elementary school. After the wind fence was built, the concentrations inside the construction site became high as the wind speeds decreased inside, but, the concentrations in the elementary school rather decreased.