| Description |
In the last decade, there has been more focus on urban microclimate due to concerns for inhabitants' health, water and energy resource consumption, and air quality. The Green Environmental Urban Simulations for Sustainability (GEnUSiS) project uses large computational platforms including the Quick Urban Industrial Complex (QUIC) Dispersion Modeling System and Uintah:Material Point Method for Implicit Compressible Eulerian (MPMICE) to study the impact of green infrastructure elements on water consumption, energy use, and air quality. Our challenge has been to accurately represent a building's geometric description as well as its interactions with the environment (via the transport of mass, momentum, and heat, etc.). High-resolution models have been developed in QUIC, but its transport processes are idealized and simplified. Conversely, Uintah:MPMICE is able to accurately model the physics, but is prone to error because of its inability to resolve fine details in complex building geometries. Previous lowerresolution studies (1.5, 2 and 4m) in Uintah:MPMICE indicated significant modeling issues including building elimination, weakness in modeling circular geometries, and inability for the user to set the direction of prevailing winds in the simulation. This research addresses these issues by developing a series of programs which import building geometry data from previous versions of QUIC, convert the dataset from ASCII format to a uniform double-precision value matrix format, remove/modify buildings based on a dimensional retention criterion, voxelate circular buildings, and rotate the computational domain. Preliminary results indicate the effectiveness of these programs to produce accurate less computationally expensive models. Future research includes importing building data from geographic information systems and processing in Uintah:MPMICE or similar platform. |
