On the Study of Ventilation and Pollutant Removal Over Idealized Two-Dimensional Urban Street Canyons

This dissertation, "On the Study of Ventilation and Pollutant Removal Over Idealized Two-dimensional Urban Street Canyons" by Ka-kit, Pieta, Leung, 梁家杰, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: In the last century, there has been a rapid growth and development in economy and modern technology around the world. This phenomenon helped improving wealth and living standard but also brought pollutions to the society and the environment. Among various kinds of pollution, air pollution takes a larger proportion. Therefore, there is increasing concern about the ventilation and pollution removal behavior in the urban environment. Among different academic studies performed, the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) had become more popular. Since wind tunnel experiments serve as validations for CFD results, this thesis developed the technique required for wind tunnels experiments and to investigate the pollutant removal related to urban geometry, as well as the technique for gas sampling to examine the distribution of pollutants in urban boundary layer over idealized two-dimensional (2D) street canyons. Three specific tasks are archived to accomplish the above objectives. The first task was to extend the wind tunnel in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the University of Hong Kong. An extension duct was designed to increase the length of the test section in which the reduced-scale model could be installed. The dimensions of the test section were specified according to the required length for fully developed flow inside the test section, the environment in the laboratory and the original wind tunnel conditions. The extension duct was then constructed and mounted, with the wind profile inside the test section obtained afterwards. After construction of the extended test section for experimental purposes, the second task was to examine the pollutant transport behaviors from the ground level of idealized 2D urban street canyons to the urban atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) using both laboratory wind tunnel measurements and CFD. Movable rectangular aluminum blocks were placed in the wind tunnel in cross-flow to construct street canyons of different building-height-to-street-width (aspect) ratios. Wetted filter papers were applied on the surface of the blocks inside the street region, modeling the source of pollutant emission inside the street canyons. The wind tunnel and CFD results complemented each other to elucidate the pollutant removal mechanism that is in line with other results available in literature. From the experimental results obtained, scaling effect was observed in the mass transfer behaviors even the flows had fulfilled kinematic similarity. A new indicator, the scaled overall pollutant removal coefficient, was formulated for the comparison of pollutant removal performance. The improved agreement in the comparison with the CFD results showed that the scaled overall pollutant removal coefficient could be used to account for the scaling effects occurred in laboratory experiments at finite Reynolds number (〖10〗 DEGREES(3 ) to 〖10〗 DEGREES(5 ) in this study) for comparison of pollutant removal performance. The behavior of pollutants inside the street canyons was studied; however, the pollutant concentration inside a street could be affected by the pollutant source in another street, even there were several streets away from it. The pollutant escaped from the source street could act as air entrainment into other streets, affecting the air quality. The concentration profile correlated to the street geometry was thus stud