Development of a fast-response building-resolving urban energy model

QUIC (Quick Urban and Industrial Complex) is a fast running urban wind and particle dispersion modeling system. This empirically based building-resolving model has been developed to rapidly compute the wind flow through urban environments and predict contaminate dispersion. The information provided by QUIC may can be used by planners to predict an optimal location to place a new structure within an existing urban layout based upon the effectiveness of the natural wind flow to remove pollutants from within a city. Furthermore, a new structure's optimal location can also be based upon minimizing the required heating or cooling throughout the year. To analyze the energy transfer within an urban environment heat transfer modes such as convection, radiation, and latent heat transfer must be considered. The work presented here describes the development of an energy model designed to calculate the total energy transfer to and from structures within an urban center by analyzing thermal advection, diffusion, and radiation. To meet the criteria of the QUIC program and rapidly model the energy transfer within the environment, the energy model is being developed using a Single Input Multiple Data (SIMD) parallel computational structure using CUDA. CUDA is a parallel programming application based on C++ which uses an NVIDIA graphics card to perform multiple calculations simultaneously and enhance computational performance. In this presentation we will present preliminary validation results for the radiation and convection sub-modules.