A study on the application of SST k-ω model on air pollution dispersion around hexahedron buildings
Air pollution dispersion from rooftop emissions around hexahedron buildings was investigated using computational fluid dynamics (referred to hereafter as CFD). The Shear Stress Transport (referred to hereafter as SST) k-ω model in FLUENT CFD code was used to simulate the flow and pollution dispersion around the hexahedron buildings. The two buildings used in the study had the dimensions of H: L: W (where H = height, L = length, and W = width) with the ratios of 1:1:1 and 1:1:2. Experimental data from the wind tunnel obtained by a previous study was used to validate the numerical result of the hexahedron building. Five validation metrics are used to obtain an overall and quantitative evaluation of the performance of SST k-ω models: the fractional bias (FB), the geometric mean bias (MG), the normalized mean square errors (NMSE), the geometric variance (VG), and the factor of 2 of the observations (FAC2). The results of vertical concentration profile and longitudinal surface concentration of the 1:1:2 building illustrate the reasonable performance for all five metrics. However, the lateral concentration profile at X = 3H (where X is the distance from the source) shows poor performance for all of the metrics with the exception of NMSE, and the lateral concentration profile at X = 10H shows poor performance for FB and MG.