Flow characteristics over flat building roof with different edge configurations for wind energy harvesting: A wind tunnel study

The impact of climate change and global warming makes it imperative to seek sustainable solutions for the built environment. To facilitate the design of future sustainable buildings, wind tunnel tests are conducted in this study to investigate the flow characteristics and wind energy potential over a flat building roof with different edge configurations. Specifically, this study addresses the effect of parapet walls and roof edge-mounted solar panels on the wind flow over a flat-roof tall building. The results show that parapet walls generally slow down the wind speed and increase turbulence intensity as well as skewness angle, which compromises the efficiency of traditional turbine-based wind energy harvesting. On the other hand, the presence of solar panels on the roof edge (or on the top of the parapet wall) further alters flow separation and has the potential to enhance wind energy harvesting over the roof, especially for the solar panel inclined at 30 degrees. In addition to providing valuable data for validating computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, this study could also help to guide the design of wind energy harvesting devices on the building roof and explore the promising synergy with solar panels.