CFD Modelling of Air Pollutant Dispersion and Inverse Source Reconstruction

Dear Colleagues,

Accurate simulation of the transport and dispersion of air pollutants is needed for real-time hazard predictions, air quality analysis, defining guidelines for siting the industrial zones, emergency response programmes, impact assessment and management studies in cases of the releases from the industrial regions, accidental or intentional hazardous episodes, etc. The problem of inverse source reconstruction is also of great importance for characterization of the unknown pollutant sources in atmospheric releases of the toxic agents which is crucial for emergency preparedness and mitigation process. These problems of the forward atmospheric dispersion and inverse source estimation become more challenging in urban and industrials environments, where models are required to include the effects of dominant urban flows processes due to buildings and other structures. The emergence of the fast computing resources and methods led to the development and applications of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models for accurate numerical simulations of the complex urban flow dynamics coupled with the equations describing the transport of atmospheric tracers. Various CFD modeling approaches, e.g. direct numerical simulation (DNS), large-eddy simulation (LES), steady RANS, unsteady RANS (URANS), and hybrid URANS/LES, etc. have been used for basic research on urban flow and atmospheric dispersion. Furthermore, inverse methods or data assimilation processes have been coupled with various CFD modeling approaches for accurate estimation of unknown source parameters in complex urban and industrial environments.

Contributions are being sought to examines carefully some of the most common questions confronting researchers and practitioners in the CFD modeling of air pollutant dispersion and unknown atmospheric pollutant source reconstruction in complex built environments. The scope of this Special Issue reflects and summarizes some recent developments relevant to the air pollutant dispersion and inverse source reconstruction using CFD modeling approaches. The contributing papers are those discussing the following subjects:

• Original or review papers on the issue of air pollutant dispersion or inverse source reconstruction using CFD modeling approaches
• Advancement of the CFD models, evaluation of the numerical accuracy, new methods and parameterizations for CFD modeling of the air pollutant dispersion
• Turbulence modeling in CFD for atmospheric dispersion
• Inversion methods and data assimilation techniques for atmospheric source reconstruction in complex urban environments
• Modeling the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) using CFD models and atmospheric dispersion in various atmospheric stability
• Validation of the CFD modeling approaches with experimental observations for air pollutant dispersion and inverse source reconstruction
• Comparison of different CFD modeling approaches for atmospheric dispersion, uncertainties analysis of the CFD approaches in the general framework, in model physics, initial and boundary conditions, input data, and other components of the CFD models and tools to minimize these uncertainties

Advantages and limitations of the CFD modeling for air pollutant dispersion and inverse source reconstruction in emergency responses

Dr. Pramod Kumar
Dr. George Efthimiou
Guest Editors

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• CFD modeling
• Air pollution modeling
• Atmospheric dispersion
• Inverse modeling and data assimilation
• Urban dispersion
• Model validation
• Atmospheric boundary layer
• Model parameterizations
• Diffusion experiments