SIMULATION OF WIND-DRIVEN VENTILATION IN AN URBAN UNDERGROUND STATION

Sustainable Energy Management for Underground Stations (Seam4us) is a European research project aimed at developing adaptive control technologies for reducing energy consumption in subway stations. The research work is developed through a pilot subway station, the Passeig de Gracia – Line 3 station, in Barcelona, Spain. The entrances to the subway station are located along Passeig de Gracia, one of Barcelona’s main avenues. In this type of location, evaluating the effects of wind, in terms of underground ventilation, requires profound investigation. In the perspective of the Seam4us project, wind-driven ventilation must be known a priori in order to evaluate natural ventilation potentials and patterns related to wind-driven ventilation, and to compute wind pressure coefficients used in a synthetic lumped parameter model that is the training model for the control policy. In this perspective, an urban canyon model was built in a commercial CFD simulation environment. Different CFD modeling steps and simulations were faced, in order to achieve reliable data, which was then compared with experimental data retrieved from an on-site survey. The results are discussed in the present paper.