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The installed pumps were designed to extract heat from ambient air. Once the heat has been extracted, it is dispersed back into the environment at a lower temperature. RBKC acknowledged that this colder air might pose a potential thermal comfort risk to residents. Our initial study showed that the thermal impact of installing these pumps would be negligible. The bigger concern was the noise generated by the pumps during continuous operation, so the Council decided to explore options to reduce noise pollution.

We began by collecting historical wind data, fitting it to a Weibull distribution, and developing a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model. This allowed us to calculate temperature differences between the pump efflux and ambient air. We also assessed the impact of wind speed, direction, and temperature, along with the heat pump operating conditions. In the second phase, we updated the computational model to include acoustic hoods. We found that these hoods had a negligible impact on temperature distribution while reducing noise pollution.

Our data-driven analysis gave RBKC confidence that installing heat pumps would have a negligible impact on human thermal comfort and plant life on the roof. However, we found there would be a risk of increased ice formation on the rooftop, as temperatures might drop by up to 3°C in the assessed conditions. Moreover, we discovered that the presence of acoustic hoods both reduced the temperature drop and limited the spread of colder air to an area closer to the heat pumps.