A cylindrical meshing methodology for annual urban computational fluid dynamics simulations. Issue 1 (2nd January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kastner, Patrick; Dogan, Timur
• Is Part Of: Journal of building performance simulation. Volume 13:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: 59
• Page End: 68
• Publication Date: 2020-01-02
• Subjects: CFD -- urban -- meshing -- box-shaped -- cylindrical -- multi-directional; 690.0113
• DOI: 10.1080/19401493.2019.1692906
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1940-1493

Abstract

ABSTRACT: For urban CFD simulations, it is considered a best practice to use a box-shaped simulation domain. Box-shaped domains, however, show drawbacks for airflow from several wind directions as remeshing and additional preprocessing steps become necessary. We introduce a routine to create a cylindrical mesh that expedites the simulation of arbitrary wind directions using OpenFOAM. Results computed with the cylindrical domain are validated against wind tunnel data. We report that the cylindrical method yields comparable results in terms of accuracy and convergence behaviour. Further, run time comparisons in a real-world scenario are conducted to discuss its advantages and limitations. Based on the findings, we recommend using the cylindrical approach if at least eight wind directions are analyzed for which we report 18% run time savings. The cylindrical domain along with automated best practice boundary conditions has been implemented in Eddy3D – a plugin for Rhinoceros.