Evaluation of fast atmospheric dispersion models in a regular street network

Environmental Fluid Mechanics - The need to balance computational speed and simulation accuracy is a key challenge in designing atmospheric dispersion models that can be used in scenarios where...     

Large-eddy simulation for flow and dispersion in urban streets

Large-eddy simulations (LES) with our recently developed inflow approach (Xie, Z.-T., Castro, I.P., 2008a. Efficient generation of inflow conditions for large-eddy simulation of street-scale flows. Flow Turbul. Combust., vol. 81(3), pp. 449–470.) have been used for flow and dispersion within a genuine city area – the DAPPLE site, located at the intersection of Marylebone Rd and Gloucester Pl in Central London. Numerical results up to second-order statistics are reported for a computational domain of 1.2 km (streamwise) × 0.8 km (lateral) × 0.2 km (in full scale), with a resolution down to approximately one meter in space and one second in time. They are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data. Such a comprehensive urban geometry is often, as here, composed of staggered, aligned, square arrays of blocks with non-uniform height and non-uniform base, street canyons and intersections. Both the integrative and local effect of flow and dispersion to these geometrical patterns were investigated. For example, it was found that the peaks of spatially averaged u_rms, v_rms, w_rms and <u′w′> occurred neither at the mean height nor at the maximum height, but at the height of large and tall buildings. It was also found that the mean and fluctuating concentrations in the near-source field is highly dependent on the source location and the local geometry pattern, whereas in the far field (e.g. >0.1 km) they are not. In summary, it is demonstrated that full-scale resolution of around one meter is sufficient to yield accurate prediction of the flow and mean dispersion characteristics and to provide reasonable estimation of concentration fluctuations.