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Urban wind energy consists of the utilization of wind energy technology in applications to the urban and suburban built environment. The paper provides some views on the progress made recently in the areas of wind resource assessment in the urban habitat; the utilization of suitable wind turbines for enhancing the exploitation of these resources; and the significant role of knowledge of building and urban aerodynamics for an optimal arrangement of interfacing augmented wind with its extraction mechanisms. The paper is not intended to be exhaustive, rather its purpose is to provide some views on the above-mentioned topics from the viewpoint of wind engineering and industrial aerodynamics in the context of buildings and cities.

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The increased demand for renewable energy and the energy efficient building designs have motivated significant research into the improvement of urban wind power technologies. There have been studies examining the performance of both existing and new turbine technologies. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of urban wind energy by examining the various types of urban wind turbine designs, with a view to understand their performance and the synergy between the turbines and the urban environments. It also considers a flanged diffuser shroud mechanism -a fluid machine, mounted on rooftop of buildings used as casing for small wind turbines to improve turbine performance by using mainly CFD. The diffuser shroud mechanism can draw the airflow over buildings utilizing its special features such as, cycloidal curve geometry at the inlet and a vortex generating flange at the outlet, to guide and accelerate the airflow inside. The performance of the fluid machine is optimized parametrically. The mechanism is modeled on a building rooftop in a real test site in Montreal, Canada with real statistical wind data. The CFD result confirms the functionality of the fluid machine to take advantage of the airflow over buildings in complex built-environments for wind power generation.