Download PDF
Improving Pedestrian Comfort in Quinta Torre with AcuSolve Computational Fluid Dynamics
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Digital Twin / Simulation
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Applicable Industries
- Buildings
- Cement
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Building Automation & Control
- Virtual Reality
Services
- Testing & Certification
The Challenge
The construction of the Quinta Torre, a skyscraper in Madrid, presented a unique challenge due to the city's naturally occurring wind loads. These wind loads not only impact the construction of the building but also cause discomfort for pedestrians walking by or staying near the building. The challenge was to predict wind conditions on the ground floor, identify problem areas with potentially stronger wind, and implement counteractive measures in the tower design. Detailed flow studies were required to identify areas of possible discomfort or danger for pedestrians and find optimal design solutions. The project leads needed this information prior to concluding the wind tunnel tests, which could take up to six months.
About The Customer
The customer for this project was Inmobiliaria Espacio, a company that deals with infrastructure and construction for all types of buildings. Among its other properties, the company owns Torre Espacio in Madrid, which together with the fifth tower are two of the few landmark skyscrapers built in Spain to date. The company in charge of the building design is Fenwick Iribarren Architects, founded in 1990 by the architects Mark Fenwick and Javier Iribarren. In addition to these Spanish projects, Fenwick Iribarren is well known abroad for its involvement on international projects in countries such as China, Dubai, Malaysia, and Morocco.
The Solution
Altair's HyperWorks Suite, solidThinking Compose, and AcuSolve were used to conduct the analyses, including Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis. The simulation used a detailed collection of several years of wind data measurements from the Madrid Barajas airport to estimate the inlet wind speed and turbulence profile. The dimensions of the computational domain were chosen large enough to avoid creating artificial effects in the results. The roughness of the terrain was addressed by an explicit modeling of city buildings and with appropriate wall functions to implicitly model smaller objects such as trees, cars, and streets. Based on the results from the CFD simulation, the Altair engineers estimated the percentage of annual time in which the wind speed exceeded a certain critical value, in the entire pedestrian area. These results identified the critical areas in the original design configuration, allowing for adjustments to attenuate the wind effect in some of these areas.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Energy Saving & Power Monitoring System
Recently a university in Taiwan was experiencing dramatic power usage increases due to its growing number of campus buildings and students. Aiming to analyze their power consumption and increase their power efficiency across 52 buildings, the university wanted to build a power management system utilizing web-based hardware and software. With these goals in mind, they contacted Advantech to help them develop their system and provide them with the means to save energy in the years to come.
Case Study
System 800xA at Indian Cement Plants
Chettinad Cement recognized that further efficiencies could be achieved in its cement manufacturing process. It looked to investing in comprehensive operational and control technologies to manage and derive productivity and energy efficiency gains from the assets on Line 2, their second plant in India.
Case Study
Intelligent Building Automation System and Energy Saving Solution
One of the most difficult problems facing the world is conserving energy in buildings. However, it is not easy to have a cost-effective solution to reduce energy usage in a building. One solution for saving energy is to implement an intelligent building automation system (BAS) which can be controlled according to its schedule. In Indonesia a large university with a five floor building and 22 classrooms wanted to save the amount of energy being used.
Case Study
Powering Smart Home Automation solutions with IoT for Energy conservation
Many industry leaders that offer Smart Energy Management products & solutions face challenges including:How to build a scalable platform that can automatically scale-up to on-board ‘n’ number of Smart home devicesData security, solution availability, and reliability are the other critical factors to deal withHow to create a robust common IoT platform that handles any kind of smart devicesHow to enable data management capabilities that would help in intelligent decision-making
Case Study
Commercial Building Automation Boosts Energy Efficiency
One of the challenges to building automation is the multitude of non-interoperable communications protocols that have evolved over the years. Buildings have several islands of automation. Bridging the islands of different automation without losing the considerable investment in each specialized control network is the main focus in this solution.
