A Multi-Flow Visual Analytics Web Platform for Detecting High Wind Energy Potential in Urban Environments

Abstract

Smart cities represent a transformative approach to urban development, leveraging advanced technologies to enhance efficiency and sustainability. Moving into the third decade of the 21st century, smart cities are becoming a vital concept of advancement of the quality of life. Without any doubt, cities today can generate data of high velocity which can be used in plethora of applications. The wind flow inside a city is an area of several studies which span from pedestrian comfort and natural ventilation to wind energy yield. We propose a Visual Analytics platform based on a server-client web architecture capable of identifying areas with high wind energy potential by employing 3D technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. The assessment of a whole city or sub-regions will be supported by integrating Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) outcomes with historical wind sensor readings. The results, in 3D space, of such analysis could be used by a wide audience, including city planners and citizens, for locating installation points of small-scale horizontal or vertical axis wind turbines in an urban area. The implementation presents various flows for spatio-temporal data processing. A number of evaluation plans assess the system performance. The results show an adequate performance, although there is a lot of room for improvement in future work.