OPEN ACCESS
In large cities, pollution composed of many different chemical components and small particles is an important public health problem that affects especially children and people presenting breathing difficulties.
One challenge for public authorities is to respect the norms given by the central state, but how? Today, concrete methods for reducing pollution are perceived by the majority of citizens as constraints. However, the authorities have the possibility of modifying the wind’s action by imposing architectural constraints, such as building emplacement and roof structure. This is the main objective of the Geneva ‘Clean City’ project financed by the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland.
‘Clean City’ focuses its research on one of Geneva’s polluted neighborhood called Pâquis, which is situated directly on the Geneva lake front. The project attempts to understand the dispersion of pollution from an experimental and a numerical point of view. After validation of the technique for a simple case, we compare environmental measurements on a 1/500 3D scale model of the Pâquis installed in an instrumented wind tunnel with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation obtained with the help of cloud computing.
air pollution, CFD, polluants dispersion
[1] WHO Air quality guidelines for particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, Global update 2005, Summary of risk assessment, available at http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/2006/WHO_SDE_PHE_OEH_06.02_eng.pdf (accessed 12 April 2014).
[2] Etude d’impacts des équipements de climatisation sur la température de l’air dans l’agglomération parisienne, available at http://www.cnrm-game-meteo.fr/spip. php?article370 (accessed May 12, 2014).
[3] Adaptation au Changement CLIMatique de l’Aggloméeation Toulousaine, available at http://www.cnrm.meteo.fr/ville.climat/spip.php?rubrique46 (accessed May 12, 2014).
[4] Centre de Recherche en Climatologie, available at http://climatologie.u-bourgogne.fr/(accessed May 12, 2014).
[5] Blocken, B., Tominaga, Y. & Stathopoulos, T., CFD simulation of micro-scale pollutant dispersion in the built environment, available at: http://www.urbanphysics.net/2013_BAE_Virtual_Special_Issue__Preprint.pdf (accessed 9 Mai 2014).
[6] Huijbregts, Z., Blocken, B., Gousseau, P., Stathopoulos, T. & van Heijst, G.J.F., CFD simulation of pollutant gas dispersion in downtown Montreal, Canada, available at http://sts.bwk.tue.nl/urbanphysics/Gas dispersion in downtown Montreal.htm (accessed May 12, 2014).
[7] International Association for Urban Climate, available at http://www.urban-climate.org/(accessed May 12, 2014).
[8] Qualité de l’air 2011 – Service de protection de l’air, available at: http://ge.ch/air/media/air/files/fichiers/documents/rapport_ropag_2011.pdf (accessed May 12, 2014).
[9] SITG – Le territoire Genevois à la carte, available at http://ge.ch/sitg/ (accessed May 12, 2014).
[10] OpenFOAM is a free, open source CFD software package developed by OpenCFD Ltd at ESI Group and distributed by the OpenFOAM Foundation, available at http://www.openfoam.com/ (accessed May 12, 2014).
[11] ANSYS Fluent is commercial CFD simulation software used worldwide, available at http://www.ansys.com/ (accessed May 12, 2014).
[12] Gervaix, F. & Ferreira, N., Rapid, Rich And Reliable Photogrammetry On Demand (R-Pod), World Engineers’ Convention 2011, available at: http://www.r-pod.ch/wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/wec10Final00211.pdf (accessed 12 May 2014).
[13] Dellay, N. & Triscone, G., R-Pod au service du “climat urbaain” avec Cean City. Geomatik Schweiz, pp. 454–459, 2013.
[14] Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers, available at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ (accessed May 12, 2014).
[15] http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/cloudflu/index.php?title=Main_Page (accessed May 12, 2014).
[16] Li, W.W. & Meroney, R.N., Gas dispersion near a cubical model building. Part I Mean concentration measurements. Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, 12, pp. 15–33, 1983.
[17] Li, W.W. & Meroney, R.N., Gas dispersion near a cubical model building. Part II Concentration fluctuations measurements. Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, 12, pp. 35–47, 1983.
[18] Tominaga, Y. & Stathopoulos, T., Numerical simulation of dispersion around an isolated cubic building: model evaluation of RANS and LES. Building and Environment, 45, pp. 2231–2239, 2010.
[19] Baniotopoulos, C., Borri, C. & Stathopoulos, T., Environmental wind engineering and design of wind energy structures. CISM International Centre for Mechanical Sciences, 531, ISBN 978-3-7091-0953-3, 2011.