Retrieval of the Unknown Elevated Emissions in Urban Environments Using Building Resolving CFD Approach

Abstract : Retrieval of the intensity and location of an unknown pollutant source in 3-dimensional (3-D) urban environment is a challenging societal problem in today's context of emergency response, for example, (a) release by unsocial elements or terrorist groups in urban area or (b) local chemical releases. This is essential in today context related to urban pollution/emergency response that require high resolution models capable of resolving the features at building and street levels. This study presents an atmospheric source reconstruction methodology to retrieve the height along with the projected location on the ground surface and the intensity of a continuous point release in an urban environment. The source reconstruction methodology is based on a recently proposed renormalization inversion technique coupled with a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling approach in 3-D urban environment. A CFD model fluidyn-PANACHE is utilized for this purpose. The methodology is evaluated with 20 trials of the Mock Urban Setting Test (MUST) field experiment to retrieve the source parameters in various atmospheric stability conditions. This study shows the effectiveness of the deterministic renormalization inversion technique coupled with a CFD modelling approach to retrieve the ground level and elevated sources in the geometrically complex urban environments. [no pdf]