Numerical evaluation of the effect of multiple roughness changes

The effect of multiple roughness changes close to a building site was examined through three dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations conducted in a virtual boundary layer wind tunnel (V-BLWT). The results obtained were compared with existing wind speed models, namely ESDU-82026 and Wang and Stathopoulos (WS) model. The latter was verified by wind tunnel tests of sixty nine cases of multiple roughness patches, and also with a simplified 2D numerical model. This work extends that numerical study to three dimensions and also models roughness elements explicitly. The current numerical study shows better agreement with the WS model, that has shown better agreements with BLWT tests, than the ESDU model. This is in contrast to previous results of Wang and Stathopoulos, who concluded that CFD shows better agreement with the ESDU model. Many cases were simulated in a V-BLWT that has same dimensions as BLWT used in the original experiment and also in a reduced symmetrical version (S-BLWT) that takes advantage of regular arrangement of roughness blocks. The S-BLWT gives results almost identical to V-BLWT simulations, while achieving significant reduction on computational time and resources.