Wind power evaluation and utilization over a reference high-rise building in urban area

To help design wind turbines around numerous high-rise buildings with promising wind in Hong Kong, this paper presents an integrated method of both macro (weather data and domain topography) and micro aspect (Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD) analysis. Long-term wind data are compared at dense urban and small island stations. The prevailing wind is found to be from the East, and the average wind speed for the urban location is much lower, say 2.93 m/s at 25 m above ground level. The need to integrate wind turbines into high-rise buildings is necessary. This research demonstrates that the wind power density at 4 m above the building roof is enhanced numerously by 1.3–5.4 times with 5–7 m/s inlet velocity. Wind power utilization around the windward top roof is the most promising under the dominant wind direction. The thickness of wind speed below 8 m/s is only 3.6 m at these areas. Due to high-rise building height and concentration effects, the wind power enhancement for 7 m/s inlet velocity is around 4 times of that for 5 m/s, which is even larger than the cube of these two velocity ratio 7/5, i.e. 2.7 times determined from the general model between wind power and velocity.