Lattice Boltzmann Method-Based Simulations of Pollutant Dispersion and Urban Physics

Abstract

Mesocale atmospheric flows that develop in the boundary layer or microscale flows that develop in urban areas are challenging to predict, especially due to multiscale interactions, multiphysical couplings, land and urban surface thermal and geometrical properties and turbulence. However, these different flows can indirectly and directly affect the exposure of people to deteriorated air quality or thermal environment, as well as the structural and energy loads of buildings. Therefore, the ability to accurately predict the different interacting physical processes determining these flows is of primary importance. To this end, alternative approaches based on the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) wall model large eddy simulations (WMLESs) appear particularly interesting as they provide a suitable framework to develop efficient numerical methods for the prediction of complex large or smaller scale atmospheric flows. In particular, this article summarizes recent developments and studies performed using the hybrid recursive regularized collision model for the simulation of complex or/and coupled turbulent flows. Different applications to the prediction of meteorological humid flows, urban pollutant dispersion, pedestrian wind comfort and pressure distribution on urban buildings including uncertainty quantification are especially reviewed. For these different applications, the accuracy of the developed approach was assessed by comparison with experimental and/or numerical reference data, showing a state of the art performance. Ongoing developments focus now on the validation and prediction of indoor environmental conditions including thermal mixing and pollutant dispersion in different types of rooms equipped with heat, ventilation and air conditioning systems.

Harmonisation in Atmospheric Dispersion Modelling Approaches to Assess Toxic Consequences in the Neighbourhood of Industrial Facilities

“…A major issue for risk assessments is the harmonisation of input data for atmospheric modelling between widely used approaches, from simple gaussian or integral models to more complex ones such as CFD (RANS or LES) approaches, whose use is continuously increasing due to the easier use of high-performance computing. To the best of the authors' knowledge, other approaches exist but are not yet widely used [7] at the microscale scale.…”

A Review of Large-Eddy Simulation Cell Size Requirements for Indoor Flows

“…That is why in these studies the building is placed in a wind tunnel (see Figure 2a). The scale of the open area could vary from a small enclosure [26] through a repetitive pattern [7,48,49] to a section of a city [50,51].…”

Wind-Induced Response Assessment of CAARC Building Based on LBM and FSI Simulation

“…They also found that the LBM method, when implemented on a GPU parallel computing architecture, was able to achieve more efficient simulations. Due to this efficient simulation capability, the LBM method has been applied to large-scale simulations of urban building clusters for wind fields and pollutant diffusion [22][23][24][25]. Buffa [26] used the LBM-LES method to simulate and validate the surface wind pressure on a scaled model of a rectangular high-rise building.…”