Numerical analysis of the wind and thermal comfort in courtyards "skycourts" in high rise buildings

Over the years, skycourts have been built to solve problems of green space shortages while providing benefits towards social and environmental benefits to the urban habitat. It is an architectural feature that can provide an alternative to semi outdoors areas. Through the analysis of previous related works, it was observed that existing skycourts are not popular due to wind and thermal comfort problems. This has led to the investigation into the aero-thermal comfort in different skycourt designs within a high-rise building model using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Validation of the base model with experimental data showed good agreement. Through the simulation of several skycourt designs to obtain wind patterns across various skycourt levels, a general relationship between wind velocity of the approach flow and skycourt levels was made that lead to the determination of a wind velocity factor that allows comparison of wind comfort within any skycourt design. Using established wind comfort criteria, comfort within various skycourt regions were analysed. The results showed that skycourt designs have minimal effect on the temperature distribution particularly when vegetation is not considered. The study also investigated how skycourts would perform under more realistic conditions by adding heat sources representing internal gains within the interior spaces of skycourts. Future studies can focus on the investigation of skycourts with adjacent buildings and the effects of vegetation on aero-thermal performance. This would allow determination of skycourt performance under more realistic conditions.