A CFD-based wind solver for a fast response transport and dispersion model

In many cities, ambient air quality is deteriorating leading to concerns about the health of city inhabitants. In urban areas with narrow streets surrounded by clusters of tall buildings, called street canyons, air pollution from traffic emissions and other sources is difficult to disperse and may a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gowardhan, Akshay A, Brown, Michael J, Pardyjak, Eric R, Senocak, Inanc
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
AIR POLLUTION
AIR QUALITY
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
FLUID MECHANICS
MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS
POLLUTANTS
ROADS
TRANSPORT
URBAN AREAS
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Summary:In many cities, ambient air quality is deteriorating leading to concerns about the health of city inhabitants. In urban areas with narrow streets surrounded by clusters of tall buildings, called street canyons, air pollution from traffic emissions and other sources is difficult to disperse and may accumulate resulting in high pollutant concentrations. For various situations, including the evacuation of populated areas in the event of an accidental or deliberate release of chemical, biological and radiological agents, it is important that models should be developed that produce urban flow fields quickly. For these reasons it has become important to predict the flow field in urban street canyons. Various computational techniques have been used to calculate these flow fields, but these techniques are often computationally intensive. Most fast response models currently in use are at a disadvantage in these cases as they are unable to correlate highly heterogeneous urban structures with the diagnostic parameterizations on which they are based. In this paper, a fast and reasonably accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technique that solves the Navier-Stokes equations for complex urban areas has been developed called QUIC-CFD (Q-CFD). This technique represents an intermediate balance between fast (on the order of minutes for a several block problem) and reasonably accurate solutions. The paper details the solution procedure and validates this model for various simple and complex urban geometries.
ISSN:1567-7419
1573-1510