Role of outdoor trees on pedestrian wind and thermal conditions around a pre-education building for sustainable energy management

Abstract

Finding sustainable energy resources is essential to face the increasing energy demand. Trees are an important part of ancient architecture but are becoming rare in urban areas. Trees can control and tune the pedestrian-level wind velocity and thermal condition. In this study, a numerical investigation is employed to assess the role of trees planted in the windward direction of the building complex on the thermal and pedestrian wind velocity conditions around/inside a pre-education building located in the center of the complex. Compared to the previous studies (which considered only outside buildings), this work considers the effects of trees on microclimate change both inside/outside buildings. Effects of different parameters including the leaf area density and number of trees, number of rows, far-field velocity magnitude, and thermal condition around the main building are assessed. The results show that the flow velocity in the spacing between the first-row buildings is reduced by 30%–40% when the one-row trees with 2 m height are planted 15 m farther than the buildings. Furthermore, two rows of trees are more effective in higher velocities and reduce the maximum velocity by about 50%. The investigation shows that trees also could reduce the temperature by about 1°C around the building.