News & Analysis
/
Article

Balconies can guide wind turbine placement in cities

JAN 17, 2025
The presence and geometry of balconies influences wind patterns and wind energy potential.
Balconies can guide wind turbine placement in cities internal name

Balconies can guide wind turbine placement in cities lead image

The complex geography of cities poses challenges to building urban wind energy. The dense arrangement of buildings, as well as their diverse designs, can affect airflow patterns and thus the wind energy potential, or the amount of wind energy that can be generated. However, few studies have examined how balconies on densely packed high rises affect wind energy potential.

Wang et al. investigated how balcony presence and geometry, as well as building arrangement and height, modify wind characteristics like wind power density and turbulence intensity that determine wind energy potential.

The authors conducted computational fluid dynamics simulations, revealing that wind power density is affected by both balcony depth and the number of balconies per building. Buildings with fewer balconies are better sites for rooftop wind turbines. They found building height also affects wind characteristics: taller buildings channel the wind, amplifying its velocity.

“This work can be used to provide design guidelines for compact building arrays with balconies for urban planning and wind energy exploitation,” said author Wen-Yu Wang. “The available wind energy potential on rooftop terraces of buildings and gaps between buildings can be significantly improved by varying the urban planning, balcony geometry, and wind directions.”

Next, the authors will extend these simulations to study how various building features, such as solar panels with different tilt angles, affect wind energy potential. They also plan to explore different types of wind turbines, including their lifetimes and aerodynamic noise.

“We hope to continue to optimize the parameters of the building array in the future and eventually apply the concept in real cities,” Wang said.

Source: “Wind energy potential in compact urban areas with balconies,” by Wen-Yu Wang, Min-Chen Tsai, and Zhong-Han Liu, Physics of Fluids (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0243434 .

This paper is part of the Flow and Civil Structures Collection, learn more here .

More Science
/
Article
AAS
/
Article
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lit up the skies over the Florida Space Coast Monday night, with the last mission of March 2025. Aboard were four crew members with a […]
AAS
/
Article
An ultra-high-energy neutrino, a galactic PeVatron, and a fading quasar at cosmic dawn are the subjects of today’s Monthly Roundup.
/
Article
Pentagonal-shaped photonic-crystal lightsails could one day propel tiny spacecraft to other stars.
APS
/
Article
A new study of complex systems supports a growing trend that focuses more on analyzing a system’s collective behavior rather than on trying to uncover the underlying interaction mechanisms.