Pedestrian wind comfort around a large football stadium in an urban environment: CFD simulation, validation and application of the new Dutch wind nuisance standard

Three-dimensional steady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are used in combination with the new Dutch wind nuisance standard to assess pedestrian wind comfort around a large football stadium in Amsterdam, before and after the addition of new high-rise buildings. The focus of the study is on the elevated circulation deck and the surrounding streets and squares. CFD validation is performed by comparison of the simulated mean wind speed at the deck with full-scale measurements. The important effect of local ground roughness specification on the simulated wind speed values is indicated. Application of the Dutch wind nuisance standard shows that wind comfort at the elevated circulation deck is only slightly influenced by the new buildings. Wind comfort at the surrounding streets and squares however significantly deteriorates. Finally, the results obtained by the Dutch wind nuisance standard are compared to those obtained by a more simplified procedure for the transformation of wind statistics to the building site, as used in earlier studies. The more sophisticated transformation procedure in the Dutch standard was successfully validated based on full-scale measurements in earlier research. Comparison of the Dutch standard results in this study with those of the simplified procedure shows that the latter provides overestimations by up to 25% for the highest discomfort probabilities. This type of large discrepancies can significantly change the outcome of wind comfort studies.