Architectural Knitted Windbreaks for Improved Wind Comfort in the City: A Wind Tunnel Study of Custom-Designed Porous Textile Screens
Journal article, 2023

There is a need to shield from the wind to improve pedestrian comfort in urban environments. Perforated windbreaks, such as fences, vegetation or textile nets, have proven to be an efficient solution, whereas knitted textiles have not yet been explored. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the capacity of knitted textile windbreaks to reduce wind velocities, to inform further research and promote wider architectural applications. Five custom-knitted textile prototypes, representing fragments of textile windbreaks, were tested in a wind tunnel and compared against a perforated and a nonperforated solid board. Forces on the models, as well as upstream and downstream velocities, were measured. The results indicate that the optimal optical porosity of knitted windbreaks should be around 10%, which differs from the porosity for perforated windbreaks recommended by prior studies. Moreover, it was observed that a textile windbreak knitted using the drop-stitch technique efficiently reduces the wind, while not generating a large drag force. Furthermore, the drag coefficient for the knitted windbreak is reduced with increased windspeed. With this, the presented study demonstrates that knitted structures exposed to wind influence have the functional potential of becoming efficient windbreaks, thus improving wind comfort and aesthetic user experience in the urban space.

porous media

knitted architectural textiles

architectural windbreak design

wind reduction

wind tunnel simulations

Author

Erica Hörteborn

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Architectural theory and methods

Malgorzata Zboinska

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Architectural theory and methods

Valery Chernoray

Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Fluid Dynamics

Mats Ander

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Material and Computational Mechanics

Buildings

20755309 (eISSN)

Vol. 13 1 34

Subject Categories

Civil Engineering

Textile, Rubber and Polymeric Materials

DOI

10.3390/buildings13010034

Related datasets

Wind tunnel data for knitted windbreak prototypes [dataset]

ID: 2022-175 DOI: 10.5878/7v2p-gr22

More information

Latest update

1/3/2024 9