Numerical Simulation of the Microclimate in the Vicinity of Green Boundary Walls
Abstract
Boundary walls, which are important for security, privacy, and partition of lands, can act as a heat source, creating a less comfortable microclimate. Green walls, where vertical surfaces are planted with greenery, have been proposed as a potential solution to improve thermal comfort in the urban environment. Studies investigating how the variation of species, and planting patterns can create the optimum microclimate, would be beneficial in this regard. Numerical simulations can play a major role for such studies where the effects of variation of species and planting patterns can be efficiently studied without using experimental set ups which are resource-consuming. This research attempted to develop such numerical simulation for boundary wall greening options and attempted to validate the results for the two microclimatic parameters, namely temperature and relative humidity (RH). Two boundary walls used in a previous experimental study were numerically modeled and validation was done using the previous data, a green boundary wall option and a bare wall option. The numerical model predicted a maximum difference of 2.2oC in temperature and a 5.1% difference of relative humidity increase near the green wall compared to the control wall. The model developed for the temperature showed substantial success while the RH model required further refinement. Future research work can attempt to improve model accuracy through the introduction of temporal variation of wind speed and transpiration rates.
KEYWORDS: Boundry wall, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Green wall, Microclimate, Numerical Modelling
