Air flow buoyancy surrounding buildings in Malaysia / Lian Yee Cheng

• Main Author: Lian, Yee Cheng
• Format: Thesis
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: T Technology (General); TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
• Online Access: http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/8342/4/KGA_100074_LIAN_YEE_CHENG.pdf; http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/8342/

In a developing country such as Malaysia, buildings have been built in fast pace. To design a durable building envelope, the air flow around a building plays an important role. The buoyancy is proven as one of the factors induced air flow pattern. The contribution of buoyancy to surrounding air flow of a building in Malaysia was comprehensively investigated in the present research. The objective of the present research is to study the significance of buoyancy in air flow movement with and without present of wind. Future development around the research building was studied as well to examine the effect of the buoyancy to the surrounding air flow. There are three research buildings for present research. The first building is the Malaysia’s Energy Commission building. Malaysia’s Energy Commission is a green building which has a unique architecture outlook makes it to be called the Diamond Building. Second building is a hospital ward tower of Sarawak International Medical Centre and the third building is Engineering Tower of University Malaya. Outdoor field data such as air velocity, surface temperature and ambient conditions were collected during physical measurement. Three dimensional air flow simulation was then carried out using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software ANSYS. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the simulation results have been carried out to investigate the influence of the buoyancy effect on the air flow surrounding buildings. The result shows that the air flow surrounding the green building has a maximum velocity of 0.69 ms-1, hospital ward tower is 0.25ms-1 and engineering tower is 0.19ms-1 which is dominated by the buoyancy effect when no wind is present. The buoyancy strength is quantified by a dimensionless number, Archimedes number. If natural wind is present, the buoyancy effect is negligible.