Wind flow modelling in urban areas: the case of Livorno city

This study is aimed at modelling the wind flow in urban areas by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations and wind tunnel tests. A quarter of Livorno city, placed in Tuscany, has been chosen as test case. The whole study has been organized in three different steps: in the first step, the quarter has been tested in the wind tunnel adopting a 1:300 scale model; in the second step, the CFD simulations have been performed on a numerical model with the same features of the wind tunnel tests; finally, the comparison between experimental and numerical results has been made. Analyses have been performed for three different wind directions and for different wind speeds. The 3D steady Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) equations and the Standard k- model have been used to performed the CFD simulations. Special care has been addressed to the definition of the grid mesh of the CFD computational domain, in order to achieve the convergence solution.