Construction and Validation of an Urban Area Flow and Dispersion Model on Building Scales

This paper presents a numerical model that simulates the wind fields, turbulence fields, and dispersion of gaseous substances in urban areas on building to city block scales. A Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach using the steady-state, Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with the standard k-ε turbulence model within control volumes of non-uniform cuboid shapes has been employed. Dispersion field is computed by solving an unsteady transport equation of passive scalar. Another approach based on Gaussian plume model is used to correct the turbulent Schmidt number of tracer, in order to improve the dispersion simulation. The experimental data from a wind tunnel under neutral conditions are used to validate the numerical results of velocity, turbulence, and dispersion fields. The numerical results show a reasonable agreement with the wind tunnel data. The deviation of concentration between the simulation with corrected turbulent Schmidt number and the wind tunnel experiments may arise from 1) imperfect point sources, 2) heterogeneous turbulent diffusivity, and 3) the constant turbulent Schmidt assumption used in the model.