Large Scale Modelling of Wind Comfort and Safety Using ‘Pedestrian Comfort Analysis’—A Cloud-Based App Crafted for Architects

Assessing the impact of building induced aerodynamics effects, on pedestrian comfort and safety, at a large scale is of great interest to local governments, architects, urban planners, designers, and developers. A common method of assessing pedestrian comfort is to perform a series of CFD simulations for different wind directions, combining the results with historical wind data obtained from the weather station near the site location and checking compliance with a suitable wind comfort criterion. The existing simulation tools and methodology demand CFD expertise and in-house high-performance computing facility. With the advent of powerful cloud computing, a new ‘Pedestrian Comfort Analysis’ application has been developed by simulationHub, that performs the CFD simulations on cloud and provides comfort and safety plots for large-scale models within hours. Through introduction and case study, this paper illustrates the ‘Pedestrian Comfort Analysis’ app to assess the pedestrian wind comfort and safety, across urban building design.