Development and Applications of CFD in Support of Air Quality Studies of Roadway and Building Microenvironments

摘要

There is a need to develop modeling and data analysis tools to increase our understanding of human exposures to air pollutants beyond what can be explained by 'limited' field data. Modeling simulations of complex distributions of pollutant concentrations within roadway and building microenvironments is feasible using high performance computing. Output from high performance computing can both be directly used to better understand specific exposure events and used to develop better simplified model approximations that may be generally applied. Unlike most currently and regulatory air quality models, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are able to account rigorously for topographical details such as terrain variations and building structures in urban areas as well as local aerodynamics and turbulence. This paper discusses the development and application of CFD simulations through case studies using Fluent, Inc Computational Fluid Dynamics software for simulating air pollutant concentrations from sources near roadways and buildings. Comparisons of CFD simulations to both wind tunnel and field measured wind and pollutant concentrations are being used to provide evaluation/validation examples that document the reliability and accuracy of Fluent's existing CFD software.