On the impact of the wind speed on the outdoor human comfort: a sensitivity analysis

The energy demand of buildings and outdoor human comfort are key elements of a sustainable urban design. The wind speed has an enormous impact on thermal sensation, but the sensation itself is hard to quantify. The objective of this paper is to understand how the wind influences thermal energy exchanges, and to quantify its impact on outdoor thermal sensation. In order to do so, three outdoor comfort models were selected. Each thermal model was then calculated for the EPFL campus (Switzerland) by coupling the software tools CitySim and RayMan. In order to factor the importance of local meteorological data, two different sources of data are used: the software Meteonorm and recorded onsite data. Results obtained underline the impact of the wind speed on the thermal perception of pedestrians, describing the sensitivity of each of the thermal models, as well as the environmental characteristics.