On the reliability of the dynamic terrain method to generate ABL winds for environmental applications

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been developing rapidly during the last decades for usage in wind engineering. OpenFOAM plays a big role in this respect since it is a reliable open-source tool frequently used in state-of-the-art applications. In the present research study, the focus is given to the analysis of wind flow, mean, and fluctuating properties of two environmental cases using a novel inflow generator method for Large-eddy simulation (LES) in OpenFOAM. This refers to the dynamic terrain (DT) method for the generation and propagation of turbulence in the computational domain. LES simulations are carried out with the DT method on two wind-tunnel (WT) benchmark case studies proposed by the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ) and widely adopted in the scientific literature: (1) an isolated building (2) a cluster of buildings. Then, the LES results are compared to the WT results of AIJ. A good agreement is found in terms of the mean and turbulence properties of the wind velocity for the two case studies. The level of accuracy achieved from the LES-DT results establishes its reliability for wind flow modeling for various environmental applications.