RANS based CFD Simulations for Urban Wind Prediction –Field Verification against MoTUS

Abstract

The current paper presents an investigation, which has its main objective in the verification of outdoor wind flow CFD simulation results (ANSYS R Fluent) with real environment measurements in urban setting. The details of the simulation set-up are discussed in the paper including the inlet boundary conditions, surface roughness parameters and the source/sink terms to represent the effect of trees. The simulation results are compared with the high-resolution on-site wind velocity measurements from the Measurement of Turbulence in an Urban Setup (MoTUS) project of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Multiple simulations were conducted to evaluate the performance of the model based on different wind direction and speeds. At the end of the current study, the highly consistent and accurate results were observed from all 18 verification cases; with the RMSEs of the simulated wind velocities in range of 0.21 and 0.59 m/s only.