Introduction
7
In consideration of sustainable development and urban expansion, in several parts of the world, compact cities with high-rise buildings are turning into the mainstream of city advancements because of many benefits, including increased land accessibility, opposing urban sprawl, less car dependency therefore lesser emission of pollutants, lower carbon footprint, and renewable resource-intensive development [22-25]. Until 2020, 1924 buildings above 200 m have been completed around the world. The city that has the most skyscrapers is Hong Kong, which is an extreme case of a high-density city. To formulate a sustainable development solution, a compact city with high-rise buildings requires cautious and proper design considerations to work in harmony with different design impacts in order to enhance wind energy growth for a clean environment. For such compact urban areas, the urban wind energy potential can be significantly improved by varying the morphological parameters, such as the urban layout [26-28], the urban density [29-31], the building geometry [32-34], and the building corner modification [35-37], etc. Fig. 1.3 illustrates a schematic of morphological parameters in a high-rise building array.
Figure 1.3. Schematic of morphological parameters in a high-rise building array.
In recent decades, many studies have focused on the effects of wind over an isolated building or a cubic array in conjunction with the essential environmental aerodynamics issues. With increasing urbanization, the renewed interest of high-rise buildings and their building array for flow complexities and urban ventilation has resulted in more research [38-40] while leading to the further necessity of understanding the urban wind energy harvesting and improvement of their available wind energy potential. Nevertheless, the compactness of high-rise buildings has received much less attentions than that of typical medium-dense urban layouts. Towards optimal design of compact high-rise urban areas, this thesis, therefore, is required to investigate the aforementioned impacts of the morphological parameters on improving the urban wind energy potential at the potential regions for incorporating wind turbines into building groups.
