The drag force distribution within regular arrays of cubes and its relation to cross ventilation: theoretical and experimental analyses

TL;DR

This study combines wind tunnel experiments and theoretical analysis to investigate how drag force distribution in cube arrays affects cross ventilation, revealing how spacing influences force distribution and ventilation efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental approach to measure drag force distribution in cube arrays and links these measurements to cross ventilation performance.

Findings

Drag force distribution varies with cube spacing, being uniform at low spacing.

Drag force on the first row dominates at larger spacings.

The study connects drag force measurements to practical cross ventilation estimates.

Abstract

A novel set of wind tunnel measurements of the drag force and its spatial distribution along aligned arrays of cubes of height H and planar area index lambdap (air gap between cubes) equal to 0.028 (5H) to 0.69 (0.2H) is presented and analysed. Two different types of measurements are compared: one type where the drag force is obtained using the standard load cell method, another type where the drag force is estimated by measuring the pressure difference between windward and the leeward facades. Results show that the drag force is nearly uniformly distributed for lower lambdap (0.028 and 0.0625), it decreases up to 50% at the second row for lambdap=0.11, and it sharply decreases for larger lambdap (from 0.25 to 0.69) where the force mostly acts on the first row. It follows that for the lowest lambdap the drag force typically formulated as a drag area corresponds to the total frontal area of the array, whereas for large lambdap the drag area corresponds to the area of the first row. By assessing the driving pressure for ventilation from the drag force, the analysis is extended to estimate the cross ventilation as an example of application of this type of measurements.