3a. Pedestrian Wind Comfort

How to run a multi-directional Pedestrian Wind Comfort simulation

When choosing for a multi-directional Pedestrian Wind Comfort Study, you get presented with the following screen:

This screen allows you to pick the Number of Directions to run. This will result in one simulation setup, with 12, 16 or 36 directional runs all contributing to the comfort and safety results.

Secondly, the Wind Engineering Standard has to be chosen. The use of the correct standard has implications in how the appropriate comfort criteria and some aspects such as terrain categories are implemented on SimScale's PaceFish solver. More information can be found here.

Wind Climate Data

Before you can continue, you need to Load your Wind Data from a file on your disk. Press the button and choose a pre-formatted .stat file representing the wind climate for your specific site. In the future this will be automated, and easier to use. The .stat file needs to be formatted in the same number of directions as chosen above. The import will do a few internal checks, will give you a message that the import of wind data was successful and now you're good to proceed.

Terrain Conditions

Next up is to set the Terrain Conditions. This is a crucial step to determine the upcoming wind conditions and speed. These conditions can be set equally for all directions at once, or tick the check box and set them separately for each direction individually.

These terrain conditions can be estimated visually by looking at Google Maps, look at the built-up areas and should really cover an average over approximately 5km stretch of incoming wind.

0 degrees means wind coming from the North (assuming the Y-axis in your Rhino points North), and 90 degrees wind from the East, etc.

Comfort Results

In the next screen you can specify for which of the layers you wish to extract comfort values. By default, the Ground_Explicit layer will be selected, but also think to include any additional ground surfaces, roof terraces, balconies and any other surfaces you want results for. The Region of Interest should be large enough to cover the radius you are interested in, and results will be extracted at a Relative Height above the surfaces, in the default case this is set to 1.5m (i.e. head height)

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