Wake Characteristics of Multiscale Buildings in a Turbulent Boundary Layer

Urban forms characterised by multi-scale roughness can drastically modify the wind structure within cities affecting both pedestrian comfort and air quality at street level. For simplicity, most urban flow studies focus on cuboid buildings with a single length scale. We consider six forms to assess how additional length scales impact urban flow: two reference cuboids that differ in aspect ratio (mean building height to width) cases (Standard, 1; Tall, 3) plus two additional fractal iterations of each. The six models have the same mean building width, height, and frontal area but their length scale characteristics differ. These are used in wind tunnel experiments within a deep turbulent boundary layer. The length scale differences are found to affect the drag force exerted by the buildings in a non-negligible way (up to 5 and 13% for Standard and Tall buildings, respectively). The added length scales also modify the wake lateral spread and intensity of the turbulence fluctuations, with smaller the length scales having the lower (higher) intensity of fluctuations in the near (far) wake. Additionally, the strength of the vortex shedding emanating from the buildings is reduced by introducing systematically smaller length scales. This work suggests that omission of additional length scales can lead to inaccuracies in drag and wake recovery estimations. The reduction in intensity of vortex shedding found with each fractal iteration could have engineering applications (e.g. reducing vibration).