Wind driven rain distributions around street canopies

Wind driven raindrop tracking is used to investigate the microscale redistribution of wind driven rainfalls in street canopies by combining a Eulerian wind flow model and a Lagrangian raindrop tracking model. The former conducts large eddy simulations of the turbulent flows in street canopies, and the latter performs raindrop trajectory calculations by releasing a large number of raindrops into the computational domain. The wind speed model is verified with available wind tunnel measurement. Twenty sets of simulations are carried out for various building configurations and driving rain angles. The simulated results show that the trajectories of smaller raindrops are more slanting and more influenced by the multibuilding perturbed flow field. Impingement of raindrops on the building envelope increases from bottom to top. The height of the front building is a significant factor affecting wind driven rain redistribution. Distinct nonuniform spatial rainfall distributions are found for scenarios with high building configurations and low driving rain angles. The simulated results are further integrated to assess the effect of real raindrop size distributions by weighing the volumetric fraction of a range of drop sizes. There is about 10 percent variation in spatial extent of street canopies. An overall 5 to 17.4 percent increase of the rainfall amount in the upwind zone is observed.