Empirical evaluation of three wind analysis tools for concept design of an urban wind shelter

Abstract

The aim of this investigation was to evaluate the performance of three wind analysis programs used in the early design stage (EDS) of a passive windbreak shelter concept for an urban context. This study compared the different workflows of these programs and the respective visualized results, identifying the differences and limitations of these tools, for design exploration. The programs tested were Autodesk Vasari, ODS-Studio, and ANSYS CFX. The results of this investigation indicate that basic computational fluid dynamics (CFD) programs such as Vasari was found to be more suitable for the observation of large-scale wind phenomena through the whole area of the shelter. Moreover, intermediate CFD tools (functions, usability) such as ODS-Studio can be used more efficiently in detailed visualization of wind interacting with design features. Finally, a more sophisticated CFD program like ANSYS CFX can be incorporated in the early design stage workflow for final verification of results.