An Integrated Cooling Jet and Air Curtain System for Stadiums in Hot Climates

Abstract

The 2022 FIFA World Cup brings Qatar great challenges in terms of minimizing the cooling energy consumption and providing thermal comfort for both spectators and players. This paper presents comparisons among the results of thermal and wind environment modelling of a semi-outdoor stadium under three different cooling configurations and a baseline configuration without cooling using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool ANSYS Fluent 18.2. The three cooling configurations are: (1) vertical jets only above upper tiers, (2) vertical jets above upper tiers and horizontal jets at the back of lower tiers and around the pitch, (3) integrated vertical jets above upper tiers, horizontal jets at the back of lower tiers and air curtains at gates. De-coupled solar radiation simulations are implemented using the solar irradiance data in Doha under fair weather conditions method in Fluent in order to capture realistic thermal boundary conditions for the ground, stadium and surrounding buildings. On the basis of the set conditions, the results show that air curtains, employed in configuration 3 are effective in preventing the penetration of hot outside air through the gates of the stadium, which is an existing issue for stadiums in hot climates, and also contribute to lower energy consumption per match than the other configurations of cooling jets. The results presented in this study are useful not only for future design and retrofits of stadiums in hot climates but also for stadiums that incorporate mechanical cooling.