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ADDRESSING ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING CHALLENGES WITH COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS
Citation:
Huber, A H., S. Rida, I. S. Bish, AND K. H. Kuehlert. ADDRESSING ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING CHALLENGES WITH COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS. Presented at 93rd Annual Meeting of AWMA Conference, Salt Lake City, UT, June 18-22, 2000.
Impact/Purpose:
The research is planned to meet the following objectives:
Support is provided to HEASD Tasks by Alan Huber. (60% 9524 New Air Toxics Modeling, ; 10% 5732 PM Population Exposure Modeling; 10% 3948 Next Generation MMMP Exposure Modeling; 10% N533 PM Toxic agent exposure modeling, and 10% 3957 Integrated Human Exposure Source-to-Dose Modeling)
Description:
This paper discusses the status and application of Computational Fluid Dynamics )CFD) models to address environmental engineering challenges for more detailed understanding of air pollutant source emissions, atmospheric dispersion and resulting human exposure. CFD simulations provide a number of unique opportunities for expanding and improving capabilities for modeling environmental flows. The application of CFD for detailed modeling of environmental flows requires tools for complex geometry creation and meshing, advanced physical models and parallel computing capabilities.
Unlike most currently used models, CFD simulations are able to account rigorously for topographical details such as terrain variations and structures in urban areas as well as local aerodynamics and turbulence. These features can be influential in determining local human exposures to environmental pollution. CFD simulations of complex distributions of pollutant concentrations within microenvironments of human exposure are feasible using today's high performance computing. Through further research, validation and testing, CFD modeling has the potential to become a reliable tool for estimating pollutant concentrations for situations that today have no reliable modeling method.
Discussions with examples are presented to highlight the use of CFD simulations as a tool or addressing environmental engineering problems. The ?basic steps' in developing a CFD application are presented. Particle attention is given to geometry modeling and meshing, the application of physical models and parameters (e.g., boundary conditions and turbulence models) and simulation post processing and evaluation.