Evaluation of a fast-response pressure solver for a variety of building shapes and layouts

A fast-running pressure solver has been developed that works within the Quick Urban & Industrial Complex (QUIC) Dispersion Modeling System. A pressure solver is necessary because the QUIC wind model is diagnostic and thus does not solve the full momentum equation nor produce pressure fields. The Poisson pressure solver utilizes the 3D mean wind fields produced by the QUIC 3D wind model and rapidly computes a corresponding pressure field around and on the faces of the buildings using a finite difference approach. This information can then be used to help determine infiltration into the building or to compute the wind load on the building. In an earlier paper by Gowardhan et al. (2007), the pressure solver output was compared to experimental data from a cubical building for boundary-layer inflow winds perpendicular to and at a 45 degree angle to the building face. In this paper, we evaluate the QUIC Pressure Solver using pressure data collected for high-rise, low-flat, L-shaped, and U-shaped buildings, as well as a 2D array of wide buildings. We compare the model-computed and measured pressure difference across the front and back faces of the buildings and show that there is reasonable agreement in most cases. Discrepancies between the model and the experimental data are a result of a number of factors including: inaccuracies in the mean wind field due to deficiencies in the empirically-based wind field parameterizations, simplifications in the pressure Poisson equation, i.e., neglecting Reynolds stresses, and the methodology used to construct complex-shaped buildings.