LES and RANS simulations of the MUST experiment. Study of incident wind direction effects on the flow and plume dispersion

Abstract

In this study, we propose to assess and compare the performance of LES and RANS methodologies for the simulation of pollutant dispersion in an urban environment by making use of field and wind tunnel measurements of the MUST experiment configuration. First, the proposed analysis addresses the relevance of taking into account the small geometrical irregularities of the obstacle array in the computations. For this, local and spatial averaged time mean flow properties are compared for two geometries, one with a perfect alignment of the containers and another one including the irregularities present in the experiment. In both geometries the incident flow is orthogonal to the front array of obstacles. The second part of this study presents simulations with different approaching wind directions to analyse the effect of small changes in the incident wind direction on the flow and on the plume dispersion. In this second part, the mean concentration field is compared with the experimental data and an analysis that relates the channelling effects with the plume deflection is provided.