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Plume or bubble? Mixed-convection flow regimes and city-scale circulations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2020

Hamidreza Omidvar Open the ORCID record for Hamidreza Omidvar [Opens in a new window] ,
Elie Bou-Zeid Open the ORCID record for Elie Bou-Zeid [Opens in a new window] ,
Qi Li Open the ORCID record for Qi Li [Opens in a new window] ,
Juan-Pedro Mellado Open the ORCID record for Juan-Pedro Mellado [Opens in a new window]  and
Petra Klein Open the ORCID record for Petra Klein [Opens in a new window]
Hamidreza Omidvar
Affiliation:
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Elie Bou-Zeid*
Affiliation:
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Qi Li
Affiliation:
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA
Juan-Pedro Mellado
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Division of Aerospace Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
Petra Klein
Affiliation:
School of Meteorology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019, USA
*
†Email address for correspondence: ebouzeid@princeton.edu
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Abstract

Large-scale circulations around a city are co-modulated by the urban heat island and by regional wind patterns. Depending on these variables, the circulations fall into different regimes ranging from advection-dominated (plume regime) to convection-driven (bubble regime). Using dimensional analysis and large-eddy simulations, this study investigates how these different circulations scale with urban and rural heat fluxes, as well as upstream wind speed. Two dimensionless parameters are shown to control the dynamics of the flow: (1) the ratio of rural to urban thermal convective velocities that contrasts their respective buoyancy fluxes and (2) the ratio of bulk inflow velocity to the convection velocity in the rural area. Finally, the vertical flow velocities transecting the rural to urban transitions are used to develop a criterion for categorizing different large-scale circulations into plume, bubble or transitional regimes. The findings have implications for city ventilation since bubble regimes are expected to trap pollutants, as well as for scaling analysis in canonical mixed-convection flows.

JFM classification

Convection: Buoyant boundary layers Geophysical and Geological Flows: Atmospheric flows
Type
JFM Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 897 , 25 August 2020 , A5
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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